Slashdot Mirror
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.
ASUS was doing this on their K6-2 Motherboards in 1999. P5A was overclocked out of the box.
I guess everyone missed out on the countless number of times Tom's Hardware has stated this.
I haven't read any recent articles, but I don't see why they would stop mentioning it.
It's not new, it's been this way for years and then they get that juicy 2% difference in performance.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
2 MHz is not going to cause random crashes, The temperature varations in a normal household would be of more concern. And the interference from the 60Hz hum in a server room is likely to cause more problems.
And this would have nearly zero effect on your FPS in a game box. What this does is push the motherboard ever so slightly ahead in the benchmark wars, making it look like Asus is building top notch boards that just seem to keep edging out the competition some how.
I seriously hope you run some insane computer / OS like a realtime QNX or some other super hardcore / stable platform that they use to run nuclear reactors and medical devices with, because if you don't... you should be MUCH more worried about the random crashes coming from the combination of cheap hardware / bloated operating system than of the 2 MHz overclocked CPU or front side bus.
Has anyone put any thought into the idea that maybe they tested their configuration really well, and they found no problems what-so-ever. It's not like we're talking about ECS or some crap board manufacturer. ASUS generally makes quality stuff... if anyone should be overclocking by default, it's them!
Er, no. It scales. It's still only 1% of the reference clock speed,assuming we have a 3GHz or above CPU, and any CPU manufacturer that tried to release CPUs that were exactly marginal on stability at the designated clock frequency would soon be out of business.
My own usual experience, back in hardware days, was that a lot of old boards were badly designed and had out of spec built in delays, but that the tolerances built in to the main components allowed them to keep going regardless. This was as true in the days when EPROM had a claimed access time of 450nS but the board only gave it 400 from address and chip select going stable, to this case where the deviation is quite small.
To be really tedious, I'm going to point out that the defined frequencies are not what really matters. What matters is the access time, the time between the input parameters going stable (i.e. address, chip selects etc. staying below the zero threshold or above the 1 threshold) and the actual point at which data is either read from or latched into a register. This is governed by four main factors - chip to chip variation, clock frequency, supply voltage at the chip, and die temperature, and that is as true for latches and registers as well as for memory and processors.
Therefore, if manufacturer A is confident that all the system delays on his motherboard are consistently within the maximum safe values by a determined amount, he may perfectly well be able to drive the clock speed a little higher than manufacturer B, whose process variations are greater or who has a less well designed board. The actual time available to the bought in components to write or read data may be greater than on manufacturer B's board, despite the higher clock speed.
Personally I do not go in for overclocking- I work for a company that now standardises on AMD64 boxes and, for our work, performance is no longer a real issue - but there is nothing in principle wrong with it. It's just like auto making, where some manufacturers release models using the same engine but slightly different torque curves and outputs, for whatever reason. They don't change the water pump and the gas pump just because one model is rated at 98BHP in one market and, because perhaps of slight variations in fuel quality, 100BHP in another market.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Big deal? No way is a 1% difference a big deal.
After all the years of building computers and overclocking, benching, reading reviews of other websites, etc. What more is there to say other than... Where have you been if _you_ didn't know this? I have seen this done by not just asus, but their competitors as well. I can recall may times where hardocp had clearly stated that one motherboard had a clock frequency advantage over otherboards. Now regardless of all that jazz, a mere 2 Mhz on the bus is not going to harm ANY processor currently on the market. The design quotas they must meet are very strict. And the same goes for the testing on quality brand motherboards, ram, what have you. Pimping and flashing their testing methods for their products is very important to these companies. They by no means make it up and jerk your chain. Besides, by going user defined on many of the bios options for memory can net you that 2mhz. This "situation" has been around for a long time, and IMO it's far too late and far too insignificant to have blown out of proportion now. Thanks :D
Modders HQ.net - Review Staff - http://www.moddershq.net
Maybe I'm terribly uninformed, but if ASUS stuff is considered "cheap," what is a quality motherboard manufacturer? Just because one can purchase it at Best Buy doesn't not reflect upon its quality as a product.
You know. They do that on purpose.
The reason a speedometer is innacurate is so that speeders end up going slower than they actually think they are. It is a road safety "feature." For example, the next time you pass one of those radar signs that show your speed on the highway, try hitting on at 90 or so. If your car is anything like mine, it will probably say somewhere between 80-85 mph. When I blaze by them at 80, it usually says 75. For a long time I thought maybe they were not calibrated, but I have realized that those signs are pretty damned accurate and it is indeed my speedometer that is incorrectly showing my speed. Now I don't know if all manufacturers do this, but it is noticable. Sometimes that is why I don't think I get tickets when I consistently drive 15+ over the speed limit on the highway, as the state troopers here give you a good 10+ mph buffer to speed safely in. If you ever change your rims and tires to a different size, you will see a dramatic change in your speed as well because the transmission counts axle rotations which will very well be smaller with larger tires. So in essence, you are going faster than the speedometer in this case. Just something to think about if you like 18 inch rims on your Audi. (why, oh why?)
Check it out one day!
zosxavius photography
I'm sure there's reason to get excited about Mhz and the possible 'moral' implications of a marketleader 'cheating', but I'll get real excited when a marketleader PC-pasts builder decides to move away from that wretched smelly BIOS based architecture. Surely companies like ASUS are large enough to start designing innovative platforms using commoditiy parts?
Via has been doing it to some extent with Mini-ITX, iWill did some interesting stuff with the dual opteron ZMAXdp... I challenge ASUS to come up with a similar innovation or achievement.
Then I'll get excited.
- It took western civilisation 2000 years to ensure popular literacy, and now we work with icon driven GUI's. Go figure.
If you have some magic way of translating one person's vote into one counted vote, I'd love to hear it.
I'm not talking about polling a sample. I'm talking about how every single voting method (except, perhaps, for an ideal computer voting system) produces a certain percentage invalid ballots.
LOAD "SIG",8,1