ASUS Secretly Overclocking Motherboards?

Hubert writes "It seems that the motherboard manufacturing industry is getting a little bit too competitive now that ASUS and many other manufacturers are secretly tweaking and overclocking the motherboard in default BIOS settings." A front side bus that's a mere 2 MHz faster may not seem like much of a tweak, but it's just enough to gain an edge over the competition.

Comments

As long as it's stable

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares?

Re:As long as it's stable

[tdelaney]

The point is, sometimes it isn't stable.

FWIW, I have 3 ASUS motherboards at home working right now - A7M266, A7V600, A7V600-X. I've also recommended ASUS boards to friends.

However, I've had more than one case where things being run just slightly out of spec caused instability. For example, a stick of PC2700 RAM. Should work fine in a 333MHZ FSB board - that's what it's designed for. Unfortunately, it turns out this particular stick is *very* close to spec - it runs fine at 333MHz, and starts getting intermittent errors at 335MHz.

I don't want motherboards to be running the rest of the system out of spec by default. If I want to run things out of spec, I'll do it myself.

So what?

[ucahg]

Is this bad, unethical, or in any way illegal? What's the big deal? Why the slashdot story?

Re:So what?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

On the surface, it seems "cool" or a "so what" situation. However, when you're relying on your PC to do real work rather than just trying to eke out a few more fps in a game, random crashes matter. And that's what these kinds of tweaks will cause. And it will be particularly annoying for people who don't know about the "secret tweaks" since they'll immediately suspect things like the memory or the processor before thinking that the motherboard settings are being quietly manipulated without their knowledge. So while this might be neat for my game box, I'd want to know about this "feature" so as not to include such a board on a production workstation or server. Cheers,

Re:So what?

[meatflower]

Depending on how you look at it, this is a BIG deal. Here's the thing.
Most websites that review motherboards do it in batches, where they'll do like 10 new motherboards with whatever the new gotta have it feature is. Maybe its a new north bridge chipset, maybe its SATA (back when that was new), something like that.
The thing is though, they post multiple synthetic tests (e.g. 3DMark and PC Mark 2001) and all the results posted are the motherboards at "stock " speeds, they haven't modified them. YOU may modify them, and they will perform better, but they're trying to show you a level playing field of all the boards they're reviewing so you can compare. If one of those boards is actually overclocked (albeit 2 Mhz ain't much) and the others are at stock, it makes that board appear to have a HUGE advatange when its stock speed may not be as good as the others. So yeah...its a big deal.

Re:So what?

[mgoheen]

> Is this bad, unethical, or in any way illegal? What's the big deal? Why the slashdot story?

What are you, a CEO of some big company?

Why yes it's bad, unethical and likely illegal.

It is bad for various reasons, one of the biggest being that you have a market leader effectively performing unqualified tweaks on the timing of various system board components. I'm fairly certain that Asus isn't doing any chip qualification tests on the components they are overclocking.

It's unethical because they are doing that to receive an unfair advantage in the highly competitive (and extremely bogus) MB performance rankings. MBs differ in performance by extremely small amounts, so a 2MHz difference is plenty to differentiate one board from another (and again, I'm not saying that this has any noticable impact on the performance of your system, other than a 1% increase in some dumb benchmark).

It's likely illegal because when Asus says it has a 400MHz system bus they are not telling the truth. That would be false advertising (I mean heck, the number is written right on the MB boxes).

But the REAL point here that is MOST disturbing is that the poster doesn't think any of this is even worth posting. THAT'S what I find most appalling. Since when is lying to gain a competitive advantage OK? It is NEVER OK.

Re:So what?

[BroncoInCalifornia]

The review sites plot results in a way that make very small differences in benchmarks look huge.

These sites review boards from different companies with the same chip sets. They are all going to come out almost the same! Between innumerate reviewers and innumerate readers, a lot of people come away thinking there is a real difference in the performance of these boards.

Re:So what?

[laffer1]

2% can cause problems. I have a MSI motherboard with an nforce2 chipset plus SATA nvraid controller. By default, MSI shipped the board 2% overclocked. My sata controller is very sensitive to the bus speed for some reason. I experienced slow disk corruption on one of the drivers. Luckily it wasn't the disk with /home on it. Eventually I figured out the overclock settings and manually forced the correct timings. Now the disk is stable and i've even been able to switch over to a raid 1 setup with the two sata drives.

In case anyone is curious, I first thought it was a cable problem and tried 5 different sata cables from different vendors on that channel. I did full tests on the drive with every program that would run. (spinrite would not run on that system) It has an AMD Sempron 2300+, Corsair value select PC2700 256mb chip, 2 western digital first generation SATA drives 80gb 7200 rpm 8mb cache (identical).

Of course, i've tried playing with overclocking a little because I wanted to prove it was the overclocking. The corruption starts at about 2% overclocked. 1% doesn't do much at all. It could be the cheap processor or ram too. If thats so, I hope asus customers always overbuy on memory and cpus.

As for asus, i used to think they were great. Then I tried to run freebsd 5.x on an asus motherboard. I want ACPI support from my motherboard vendors. Asus doesn't feel they need to finish their ACPI support in their bioses but sadly MSI does.

Re:So what?

[1u3hr]

I'd disagree here - the consumer of the board is getting a "better" product that has a higher spec than what is on the box.

Though I hate car analogies, perhaps this tie one might be appropriate. Consider a car where the speedo was deliberately calibrated to show it going 2% faster than reality. This car will have a lower 0-60 mph time in benchmark tests (probably they don't trust the car speedo in reality, ignore this...). The car isn't better, it just appears to be. And the mobo isn't better; it's misreporting its settings. A similar board with honest settings could perform as well, but the overclocking would be apparent. Both probably have the same ultimate limits when tweaked.

What's the definition of overclocking?

[Tango42]

Is it really overclocking if the manufacture does it? Isn't it just deciding the default settings? Components aren't made with a built in correct speed - there is a certain speed that going above means you've overclocked it. They decide the level of stability they want and set the components accordingly. All this means is that they've decided that stability is slightly less important in comparision to speed than they had decided previously. It's not overclocking.

Re:What's the definition of overclocking?

[adolf]

In other news about manufacting tolerances: Resistors spec'd at 5% tolerance are found to consistantly be 5% less than their stated value, in order to save money on raw materials.

Unless the PLL in the motherboard is periodically recalibrated using (for instance) NIST, there's no way in hell that it's ever going to be accurate.

Furthermore, all of these motherboard tests are based on whatever the computer's RTC thinks is reality, but we all know that those drift all over the place. If 1 second != 1 second (and it never does, save for machines properly synchronized to NIST using NTP or somesuch), then the test is meaningless anyway.

Think about the process a bit, and you'll see that there's essentially zero control in the typical PC reviewer's test enviroment (which seems to consist, primarily, of a kitchen table and a digital camera). Components change with time and temperature and voltage, and there's no such thing as a stable consumer-grade clock.

That all being said:

If a part advertised to run at 800MHz actually appears to run at 802MHz, we're talking about an error of only .25%. And that, sir, is a fine margin for a consumer product, being damn near spot-on.

I mean: If you bought a 200 horsepower car, would you be upset if it only produces 199.50 HP? What if it actually made 200.50 HP?

0.25%

If you complained to Honda, or GM, or somesuch, do you really think you'd be taken seriously?

I mean, geez. For fuck's sake, grow up. It's one-quarter of one percent. Try measuring a "pound" of flour, or a "gallon" of milk, or a "liter" of Pepsi sometime.

("Dear Wal-Mart: I recently purchased from your store a gallon of milk. When I took it home and measured it using my graduated cylinders, I found that it was actually 1.0025 gallons, which is clearly not as advertised. Unless I happened to miss a sign reading "Milk values are specified to a tolerance of +/- 0.25%," I want my money back. Thank you.")

Reference Clock

[Zo0ok]

This may be a stupid question, but I wonder: what reference clock is used. It appears the values compared are obtained from simply reading the MHz-value in a Windows dialogue. What says 200MHz on one board is exactly the same as 200MHz on another board anyways? How accurate are the clock-cycle-generator on a MB? I can just tell that the clock of my PC is very inaccurate, compared to my waist-watch.

the reason it's a problem

[digitalderbs]

Theoretically, the reason it's a problem is because it invalidates the benchmark.

Suppose another motherboard was actually faster than the ASUS, but decided to not overclock. If it had overclocked like ASUS, it would have outperformed the ASUS motherboard (hypothetically speaking).

I don't think the situation is bad now, but it could end up like video cards (Nvidia vs Ati and driver optimizations). The result is that benchmarking will no longer be useful because the comparison is between an apple and orange.

Performance difference exaggerations

[mickwd]

"A front side bus that's a mere 2Mhz faster may not seem like much of a tweak, but it's just enough to gain an edge over the competition."

People need to learn to read graphs. "Best" is too often judged on speed, to the exclusion of other important factors. And too often, performance graphs in magazines and articles are drawn to exaggerate the differences between the worst-performer and the best performer, when the actual performance difference may be 1% or 2%. In terms of PC performance, neglibible.

But a 2% performance improvement may make the difference between a component or system being labelled as "disappointing" and "out in front" by a lot of dumbed-down magazines and online articles.

If only people were better able to keep a sense or proportion, and view performance tests with a little more intelligence, manufacturers wouldn't be so tempted to pull silly stunts like this one.

Re:Speed

[__aajwxe560]

Understood, but the facts in the article state that this seems like no accident (by the consistent adding of 2Mhz when scaling the speed), which is noteworthy. I am not a motherboard designer, so I admittedly don't understand what the acceptable threshholds of errors are in these sorts of scenarios, so at what point is the deviation acceptable? If ABit comes out with a motherboard that "accidently" is 4Mhz faster, and the processor then ends up running 66Mhz faster, is that then unacceptable, or still acceptable as a general standard? Does such a standard exist?

they've been doing this for a while

[thegoogler]

i have an asus P4P-800e deluxe motherboard, and it runs stock at a 808mhz fsb, now thats a farely old mobo, 865pe chipset. from about 2002.

i always just thought it was just that the timing crystals/chips they were using were cheap and inaccurate, but i guess not. or maybe this is just the old "never attribute to malice what can be easily attributed to lazyness"

Stupidity alert

[janoc]

Folks, do you realize that the manufacturing tolerances of the oscilators and crystals driving various bits and pieces of your machines are in the range of 1-2 MHz for every 100MHz oscilator? Obviously not.

It is completely normal to have an oscilator labeled as 200MHz (e.g. driving FSB) which has real frequency (measured) of e.g. 199.8MHz or 202MHz. That is all in tolerance, because - surprise - the exact frequency doesn't really matter for this application. What matters is stability of the frequency, that's why a crystal oscillator is used in the first place. The frequency has to be in the range permitted by the chip maker's spec and you have to be careful if you need to divide the clock somewhere to have integral ratios, but whether it is a bit higher or lower makes really no difference.

So all this brouhaha is bull - the difference between the set 201MHz and real 203MHz could very well be just that that the machine cannot set arbitrary frequency (hint - integral frequency division ..) so it sets it to the nearest integral value possible.

Of course, an evil conspiracy by ASUS is an easier explanation instead of using your own brain.