Transaction Booster

Among the Asus P5K Deluxe BIOS Setup settings we also found a new option that we haven’t seen before called Transaction Booster. You can set it to Auto, Enabled or Disabled. By selecting Enabled or Disabled, you can access another additional parameter: Boost/Relax Level.

We decided to see how this new option affects the system performance. The tests were performed in the same conditions, with the CPU configured as 8 x 400MHz. the memory was working as DDR2-800 with 3-3-3-10-2T timings. Unfortunately, we couldn’t check out Transaction Booster operation with the Boost Level set to 1, because the board wasn’t stable enough in this case.

The obtained results showed that enabling Transaction Booster helps increase the system performance. In real application this improvement hits 1% over the performance level you get with this parameter set to Auto. If you disable Transaction Booster altogether, the performance will drop with any Relax Level settings other than 0.

So, Asus engineers provided their mainboard with another option for performance improvement. Although we have to admit that Transaction Booster function has very limited application field. When it is enabled, the memory frequency potential lowers, so it actually works only with low memory frequency settings. For example, Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D memory we used in our test platform allowed enabling Transaction Booster function only when its frequency was set below 900MHz. Enabling Transaction Booster at higher memory frequencies led to system instability.

Our tests show how Transaction Booster affects the performance of the memory subsystem and the whole platform in general. However, it still doesn’t answer the question on how Asus engineers managed to speed up the performance of the Intel P35 chipset. MemSet utility can cast some light on that matter, as its latest versions run quite OK with Intel P35 based mainboards.

We used MemSet 3.3 to compare secondary timings with enabled and disabled Transaction Booster. It revealed that this setting affects Performance Level parameter that proved to have serious influence on the memory controller performance.

The smaller is the Performance Level value, the higher is the actual performance. By enabling Transaction Booster, you can reduce the value of the Performance Level parameter.

By the way, Transaction Booster is not the only BIOS Setup parameter that affects the Performance Level. It can also be lowered by disabling DRAM Static Read Control option.

Enabling DRAM Static Read Control increases the memory controller performance; disabling – decreases.