***Official Asus P5WDG2 WS PRO & P5W64 WS PRO Thread***

[ted34]

As these 2 boards are so similar in overclocking it seemed to make sense to make thread for both of them. Apart from the obvious 4 pci-e slots on the P5W64 then even the bioses are very similar. The P5W64 is slightly better at clocking as its bios has couple of extra memory tweaking options.

P5WDG2:
All bioses including beta's can be found here as well as volt mods and pencil mods:
http://infomb.googlepages.com/home

I have tried the 0408 and 0005 and have found the 0005 much better and far better than any of the other bioses available for stability. a lot of the bioses overvolt but a couple do undervolt so becareful if you go from an overvolting bios to an undervolting bios.


P5W64:
Fair few of the bioses can be found here:
http://www.overclock247.com/day187/
Important: Do not change the VID Cmos Setting and the Microcode Updation and later bioses allow disabling of 1 cpu core.


General settings:

IDE Configuration: Set ide detect time out to minimum for quicker bootup.

In cpu settings disable all of the below and this then generally allows higher cpu clocks (at standard they all disabled except for Virtualisation Technology):
Max cpuid value
Execute Disable Function
Enhanced C1 Control
Virtualisation Technology
Cpu Internal Thermal Control
Intel Speedstep tech

In ram settings disable:
Dram ECC mode (unless using ECC ram)
Dram throttling threshold
Hyper Path 3

If struggling to get ram stable then try changing the below. These are only available in the P5W64 bios and for P5WDG2 the RMS and TRFC have to be changed using memset. Hopefully a bios with more tweaking options will be released in future for the PRWDG2:
Refresh Mode Select (RMS) to 15.6, 7.8 or 3.9us
Refresh Cycle Time (TRFC) to 42
Read delay to 7 or more


Overclocking and volts:
Vcore volts vary a lot between bios setting and actual setting so be careful and go by your temps reported by TAT or coretemp and not by Asus or other board software.
Fsb: 1.4 max. (Generally 1.3v is enough unless your using high fsb)
Mch (Chipset): The chipsets get hot so remove the useless plate from the top of the heatsink and let the fins breath a bit more. Stick a fan blowing over this or use water to cool it. For volts 1.8v+ is needed to run on a divider so test at 1:1 first to check cpu and memory and eliminate the board. For more than 1.8v use a voltmod.
Ich: Set to 1.2v

Volt measuring points:

 

[ted34]

thinking of replacing my p5w64 with badaxe 2

problems with these board theres loads

1.onboard sound optical & coaxial outputs, only output 2
channel stereo and also puts about 14 loading bars
onto windows scroll bar

2. reports of firewire ports dont work

3.double restarts soon as you go 350 fsb
if i change anything in bios other than overclocking options
it still double restarts, double restarts this is bad for hardware
fans on contollers, & water setup, & hard discs & power supplys.

4.the crappy pci-e clips are cheaply made and snap of when trying
to get raid cards out if you have a dual slot graphics card.


its pretty much easy to hit high FSB 425 +.
Memory for this to get is MICRON based, avoid elpida & prommos
with asus 975 boards.


Vcore 1.2875 ACTUAL IS 1.35 this drops to 1.33 under Load
FSB termination = 1.4V best to have it at this problay get away with 1.3
MCH Chipset voltage = 1.6 for upto 425 fsb 1.7 if going above 430 fsb
ICH Chipset voltage = 1.2 you can leave this auto is you like

I have disabled the onboard audio as use an x-fi but never noticed long load times before it was disabled. Annoying thing is it does take a while to detect usb devices attached right at the beginning of booting up.

Who uses firewire anyway these days + havent heard any probs about this but it should be fixed in later bioses

Mine has always shutdown for couple of secs on restarts - was a lot of talk on xtremesystems about this and damage to drives but most people agreed that it wasnt doing any damage as drives always spin up and down anyway.

Asus have always used rubbish clips on pci-e slots - its better to snap them off if you ask me - dfi never used them

As for volts most 975 boards drop a little under load and the asus drops a lot less than most. Depends on bios version as to whether it undervolts or overvolts etc but remember to use high mch volts if using divider or memory just errors in memtest.


The chipsets apparently get fairly hot but mine has always sat at about 25 degrees with volt increases making no difference. I did remove all the heatsinks straight away and put artic silver on them

 

[ted34]

Take the memory out the equation - put them at 4,4,4,12 @ 2.35v which should be more than enough juice for them to run at 400mhz. Also try other slots on the board (not sure which slots are best for teamxtreme but i remember the asus a8n sli premium that gave me an extra 20mhz on a set of corsair sticks when i changed slots). Also try just running 1 stick and see what happens and last thing i can think is to take cpu out equation - run a divider and keep multi at default, cpu within known fsb limits and run ram high. Make sure mch volts are at 1.8 for this.

 

[ted34]

Forget the spd timimgs. They are nearly always wrong on memory sticks these days. If they were sold as 3,3,3,8 and thats what the stickers say on the sticks then thats what they will do unless they are faulty. Does sound like yours are faulty or just dont like the asus board. Have you had a chance to try 0005 bios?

 

[ted34]

For these boards to run the high FSB chipset cooling is required. Decent Active cooled copper heatsink is fine. that standard heat pipe junk is no good. and giving it more voltage also wont do you any good as it will heat up more and become unstable.
QUOTE]

I reseated all the chipset coolers and used artic silver 5. My case does have good airflow with being an eclipse 62 but both fans run constantly at 7v. Upping the volts though doesnt seem to make much difference to my chipset temps which is weird as a lot of people report problems. Going to try lowering the multi and see what my board tops out at. What cooler would you recomend on the chipset?

 

[ted34]

Matt any chance you could post some more picts of inside your case around the chipset and mofsets.

 

[ted34]

Thanks matt for the photos. I also have a fan (80mm) over my ram which also points towards chipset which helps keep it cool. Havent noticed the caps getting hot so will have a look at that. Im running low volts (1.45) for 3.5ghz. Any higher needs quite high volt increases to get small clock increases. Its annoying as was hoping for 3.6ghz and my temps are great now cpu has been lapped and did a mod to waterblock.1dmf: What bios are you using? What psu are you using? Is starting to sound like a duff board though or maybe duff cpu.

 

[ted34]

no i didn't , I wanted to send the ram back anyhow , it wasn't worth the money, poor quality heatspreader, runs hot, i'd rather have PC8000, cheaper and run stock than pay extra for the Team and have no benefit , higher volts and run hot!

I'm gonna stick with what I got now, 3.5ghz 1050mhz ram, it's more than fast enough for me, currently playing 'Need For Speed - Most Wanted' it runs so smooth it's unreal

what ever i throw at this rig it keeps begging for more, and i'm not one for benching , it's just numbers at the end of the day, and i still paid less for this rig than when i built my P4 2.8ghz fsb800 rig, crickey I paid a small fortune for 1gb of Kingston hyperX DDR400 way back when , so really bang for bucks, i'm happy, just aint gonna get in the OC hall of fame, never mind eh

edit : oh and i wasn't neccesarily after 4ghz , I would have been happy on a x9 multi

2nd Edit : also at least I finaly have my Adaptec U320 SCSI in a 133mhz 64bit PCI-X slot , about time too

Also agreed. I was hoping for 3.6ghz but my chip seems to be topping out at 3.5ghz which isnt bad. Run my memory which is gskill hz6400 at 4,4,4,12 and at 5:4 and that is faster than at 1:1 in superpi. Couldnt get it to run at 3,3,3,8 at 1:1. I use to have an fx60 at 3.1ghz with ram 1:1 at 239mhz 2,3,2,5 (???world record maybe for cas2 2gb kit???) and it doesnt even come close on performance to my 6600. Think a lot of it is the intel chipsets are a lot better than nf4.

Do the scsi cards and drives make much difference. Guessing your using 15k drives. Whats noise like?

 

[ted34]

Anyone still running one of these? Just wanted to know peoples opinions on the later bioses over the unofficial 0005?

Anyone tried running 4x1gb sticks?