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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.
Who cares?
Is this bad, unethical, or in any way illegal? What's the big deal? Why the slashdot story?
Saves me the trouble
Wonder if someone decides to sue ASUS for lost productivity over potentially decreased stability and hardware durability?
Pair this story with the little quote of the day "It's better to burn out than to fade away." Coincidence?
My humor is probably your flamebait
I've noticed this trend ever since the P4S8X which provided BIOSes to fix crashes, but came at a ~10% computer speed reduction when using convential benchmarks. The people who were not crashing were told not to upgrade from the forum communities, where the people who were crashing updated immediately for system stability. It was a mixed blessing as system stability came with a price tag of retarded computer speed performance.
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
Sorry. Is there an article linked? I saw some preamble and some advertising and some gratuitous web dross, but an article? I'm afraid I missed it.
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.
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.
Cool, now the warranty's been voided out of the box. :)
Sent from my computer.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!
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.
"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.
And if we compared that to a 486.. we could say it made a significant difference. Work out that the percentage change in performance is pretty negligible, and that it is actually not far off from what happens in systems by accident anyway.
they've asked their frames-based websites back
then the product is not of merchantable quality and you can sue their ass off. If the system's still stable, then what's the problem?
I am trolling
This isn't so new... My ABIT AV8 was out of the box overclocked with 204 Mhz FSB...
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?
I've seen this before. For a few years now various motherboards have been discovered to be not exactly on the mark with the FSB.
Hell, my own A8N-SLI Deluxe varies vetween 1995 and 2015 MHz while set to 200x10.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Who writes this stuff? This is very very old news. MSI began this stuff http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030522/
I have a feeling that Intel and a few other parts manufacturers are going to decree that this voids their warranty.
And the fact that this is done out of the box and without the user's knowledge, yes, its a bad thing.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
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
You're right that ASUS boards have been known to have the ability to overclock. But the point is, that they have never been set to overclock out of the box (you had to intentionally bump up the FSB). The board they show here overclocks whether you ask it to or not.
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.
Some points critiquing this review:
* He's measuring using software. The error margin of software methods to measure this kind of thing dwarf 2% and head into the 6% range; typically more so with voltage measurement, which motherboards tend to measure about 0.1V lower than they really are; but for this kind of thing, we should demand testing with a correctly calibrated and maintained hardware frequency counter. I don't think CPU-Z qualifies to measure a change that small reliably.
* This is normal, and within expected tolerances; it's only running a bit high because the natural wandering of his motherboard's PLLs is a little high, and it's only 33MHz above because it's being rounded up when locked.
* Each individual motherboard will have a slightly different clock. Some vary WAY more than this. And only one motherboard of each model tested. That isn't statistically significant, particularly as this is an issue which will vary from individual motherboard to motherboard, as it relies on the tolerances of the clocks. He needs to take a lot more samples; over 100 really; and graph a bell curve from that.
* Also - only one control?
Furthermore, I think this reviewer simply doesn't understand the default settings of the motherboard. He's letting it select sensible defaults, then complaining they're not as sensible as he'd like. He's complaining that his particular motherboard is a little bit out on manual settings, but really if he's that concerned about such a small change, why isn't he testing using hardware?
I think the memory timings can be put down to ASUS's "AI". This is a motherboard feature... and it can be disabled. ASUS's concept "Normal" or "Slower" is a very small push, but if he wants to run truly at stock like a paranoid, use "Disabled", Manual timings on memory, and lock the PCI speed to 33MHz. That goes particularly for the PEG Link Mode. This is normal and expected behaviour for an ASUS (and everyone else).
However, the fractional overclock is actually well within what would be considered normal tolerance. 6% at worst, and that's only on the PCI bus if you didn't lock the PCI bus clock (but in fact it _does_ lock the PCI bus clock, he just didn't measure that bus).
If this caused any problems with system components, the components would not be binned at this level, as for example CPUs are required to pass all self tests at over 10% over a given bin speed to actually make the bin (to reduce returns and DOA); less than that and they will go into the lower bin, because there's a question mark about their ability to perform consistently at stock.
So yeah, his motherboard might be (according to software) running a trifle high; but only 1.1%-1.2% high. Woo, his motherboard's within normal tolerances. Whole lot o' nothing, from a guy who just wants blog traffic.
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"
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ahhh... Still it's not news wordy in my opinion...
... ASUS changed some megahurtz in some part of the mama-board , and it is a bit faster without sacrificing stability , and with the same guaranty.
The question is why should we care? It's their choice , their motherboard. If they choose to use quality materials that enable them to overclock by 2Mhz then let them do it.
I wish they would overclock by 20Mhz and still offer the same stability and guaranty.
I fail to see why this is bad.
-- TRUST ME! I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!
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
Since it was apparently quite easy to find the overclocking, and it is probably difficult to hide it from plain sight -- perhaps the reviewers should be routinely verifying all the clock rates & timings before they run their benchmarks. Instead of simply saying that "Motherboard A performed better than Motherboard B at the default settings", they should be saying "Motherboard A performed better than Motherboard B" with all clock rates and RAM timings set to stock specifications." And if they cannot set the BIOS in a way to meet the stock specifications, then the motherboard is defective and that should be noted.
as a scheduled task. You can set multiple schedules to set your time every four hours, every hour, every five minutes, whatever. FYI, the default NTP server for an XP machine is time.microsoft.com. Look at the help for net time to choose your favorite NTP servers.
Few motherboards are set exactly to 200MHz, or whatever mhz they are to use for an exact clock. You simply set them to the correct one. Of course 1MHz off doesn't matter much in the grande scheme of things, but I've seen as high as 4MHz off before. New news this is not even close to being. They should have checked the MHz before they even started benchmarking. It has been widely reported for years, but then actual news I submit goes rejected. Adios the good old days of /.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
I seem to remember articles as far back as 2000 discussing ASUS' penchant for minor OCing to improve performance. My old KT133-based Asus board, for example, ran a 135mhz FSB, and many a thread in support forums mentioned that this was common practice for performance reasons.
This was not a case of crystal timing being off, either; many, many people had similar settings and it was agreed that this was Asus "Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge" marketing system.
[blockquote]Suppose... If it had... hypothetically speaking...[/blockquotequote]
That's exaclty why it does not matter actually. Who cares about if's, suppositions and hypothetical situations?? The only thing Joe User is interested in, is that it performs better in reality. If that is, because it's overclocked, that's fine, others are free to also apply this trick. Of course, for overclockers it could matter, becaues that could mean their board will overclock less, but that's just another point which can be verified and compared in benchmarks, for those who care
My A8N-E had an even stranger problem. I had no floppy drive in the system, but if I disabled the floppy in the BIOS, the FSB would randomly set itself to 201 or 216Mhz no matter what FSB I set in the BIOS. The POST screen showed the correct speed, but once I booted into Windows or Linux it showed 201 or 216. I never bothered asking ASUS about it. From posts in hardware forums it doesn't seem like ASUS cares much about BIOS bugs.
Net Time is the quick and dirty solution, but if you want something more elegant (although I don't know what you'd be running on XP that would be so critical as to not be able to compensate for a backwards jump in time), I would recommend looking up the Windows Time Service. It will jump the clock forward to sync, or it will slew the clock if you are less than three minutes ahead of your time server, and sets the clock backwards if you are more than 3 minutes out of sync. The default polling interval is 45 minutes, so if you are experiencing 10 minutes of skew per day, you shouldn't notice that unless you are disconnected from the internet for more than seven hours at a time. And if you are disconnected that often, and not running any services that are time dependent, why are you worried about the time sync anyway?
...since they've never allowed any kind of overclocking.
The conservative choice.
Won't this potentially start an arms race? Sure, it's only 2MHz now, but then the other mobo manufacturers may decide to add a 5MHz boost to put their boards back in front. Then ASUS will have to add a 10MHz boost, and so on.
I think the issue here isn't whether 2MHz is significant per se, but that it forces everyone to start to drift further and further away from the rated speed. Eventually this process is going to result in distortions that *do* matter.
I went to the site, but couldn't find the content. Just an introduction and ads. Lots of ads.
And if you are disconnected that often, and not running any services that are time dependent, why are you worried about the time sync anyway?
:-) I just find it bizzare that it's off THAT much. I'll probably do the net time just for the heck of it- thanks!
The only time critical application is my wife looking at the time in the morning and freaking out thinking's she's late
I have an Intel D845PEBT2 desktop board that allows up to a 4% overclock in the BIOS. The feature is labelled something like 'Stability Test', but it bumps up the FSB and memory speeds.
I bought it back in late 2002. Here's a link from Tom's just in case you're the skeptical type.
"Why don't you interface with my ass...by biting it!" -Bender B. Rodriguez
I believe the other motherboard manufacturers usually add this as an overall setting that can be enabled or disabled in the bios--Gigabyte for example, has a "Top Performance" setting. By default it is OFF.
ASUS on the other hand is being sneaky. You set speed settings to "Auto" or "Normal" and you get overclocked anyways. The only way to turn off the overclocking is "Slow."
As the article noted, this is primarily for synthetic Benchmark cheating.
here's the review: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjQ3LDE=
Windows XP comes enabled by default to automatically syncronize the time. It does this once a week to time.windows.com or to whatever server you choose. Setting a scheduled task to do it is something you have to do pre-xp. Note: When part of a domain it one of the domain controllers for syncronization.
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.
Remember that time and place when you could tell people who didn't know how to use a computer "A computer is just a stupid person who does EXACTLY what you tell them" ???
Now it seems they are doing things without us... well the companies that make them...
**glares at his mobo.... (mofo) **
My no-name 350 MHz Pentium II should have had a 100 Mhz FSB. The default setting was 103 Mhz in the BIOS, making the default system a 360 Mhz system. The BIOS had five settings for the FSB speed. 66 MHz, 100 Mhz, 103 Mhz, 107 Mhz and 117 Mhz. The low three speeds were stable. 107 Mhz tended to run for most of a day, and then would crash. If the system was powered off and allowed to cool, the 117 Mhz setting would run find for about 10 minutes - just long enough to run a quick benchmark.
The Pii died - well, both ISA controllers died, and i stopped using it. It lasted five years.
-- Stephen.
If this is verified, I will never buy from ASUS again. Before I thought they were a vendor of quality motherboards.
--
Bush lied, many died.
Other people who responded to your post seem not to have understood it.
Motherboard speeds vary by a small amount. So, the testers cut off the bottom of the graph bars. That makes a 1% improvement look like a reason to buy one motherboard over the other. It makes a 1% improvement on one look as though the others are slow for some reason. People think, Why? Maybe other things will be slow, as well.
--
If you support dishonesty and violence, don't say you are Christian.
This has been going on for a while now.
Just another crappy blog
My nvidia 6600GT card worked fine in windows, however had what i recognised as overclocking errors in X. I found out by default Asus was overclocking my card, I disabled that and it worked fine. About 6% i believe it was from memory.
I find a lot of OEM machines, especially the $500 computer systems are about 1-2% underclocked.
Must be that ASUS knows they're using quality components so that +2% won't hurt, and Dell realizes that everything is so cheap that -2% is going to be needed for stability.
Don't believe me? Try running your external hard drives off the front USB connections.
I don't see the big deal in bumping up the FSB 2MHz. As long as they build quality in their motherboards, the 2MHz difference is negligible. My A8V Deluxe defaults at exactly 200.3MHz on the FSB instead of an even 200MHz and I don't have any hardware or stability issues from the 300kHz increase. IIRC, that old A7S-VM I used to have also ran slightly OC'd and I've never had any problems with it. You're really going to have more problems from badly written software, transient voltage spikes from the power grid, marginal memory modules, or a defective/underpowered PSU before you have a problem from a FSB bumped up an asshair or two. You'll just have to do your part and buy good quality memory.
I'm not able to quote this - maybe it's my hazy memory - but I'm rather sure ASUS always overclocked their gaming/performance boards by 5Mhz. At least since I first looked back in 2003.
And, IIRC, they were upfront about it and would extend warrenty coverage to any part on the motherboard that was damaged by their overclock...
If they ever lied, it was at most not stressing that fact in their marketing. But I think their phone support/sales told me that when I was researching it.
Of course, if your research is purely based on what companies print on the box...
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Where do you get your crystals? I'd expect 500 ppm (0.05%) or better from the worst grade crystals. More typical is 100 ppm (0.01%) for low grade crystals.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Well, if reviewers focused a little less on easily quanitified measurements (monotask speed in general, FPS in particular), and a little bit more on real-life stuff, I might no before hand if my new motherboard will:
- slow down to a crawl when using USB
- have a very crappy video signal that won't run my high-end 19" CRT at 1600x1200 (IGP chipsets)
- have very bad sound quality (not performance)
- be noisy
- be incompatible with cheap RAM (nForce 3/4)
- have very unstable USB2
That, TO ME, is what is really important, I have run into some or all of these problems with my 5 latest MBs, the situation seems to be getting worse, especially the video signal quality. And NO, USB on non-intel chipset does NOT work well.
Have I ever seen a review catering to those concerns ? NO
In my experience, Asus, Asrock and ECS are the ones with the fewer issues, esp. Asrock, but buying a board still smacks a lot of russian roulette, even with around 10 websites publishing a review for each and every new board.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
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.
Im just assuming here, but most components come with warenties that are voided when you overclock them, so this ASUS board may very well be coming with a void warranty before you open the box. Also it has a good chance of voiding the warranty on any other components that now run at a higer speed than specified, (i.e. everything) so if it does void all your warranties, then it is a big deal.
I've set up/troubleshooted a few Asus motherboards that had the default setting of "Auto Overclocking", they all were crashing and failing memory tests...I turned off the auto overclocking features (setting to manual, proper speeds) and wow, everything worked.
Indeed, you are right of pointing out the consequences of skin effect. The cutoff frequency of the Faraday cage would only be limited by the size of its defects - if it was made of a perfect conductor.
However, I do think that you usually compute the skin depth for a e^-1 reduction in strength. That means you don't need really more than 10 mm (around 1/3 of an inch) to get an effective shielding.
On some MB's from ASUS, which were occasionally getting BSOD's under XP pro, and later were failing a good torture testing under Prime95 at my shop. When it was only a couple coming up that way, I originally was chalking them up as just a couple of off spec MB's. But as more ASUS based systems started cropping up acting the same way at a colleague's shop, we both began to suspecting that something had gone awry with ASUS's fab process, and immediately cycled those systems out of our inventory to avoid it becoming a failure concern like the leaky capacitors.
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
Overclocking is taking something that is stated and supported at a certain level, and going beyond that supported level.
So, if they do it, it is not more different than AMD/Intel shifting the boundary for chips that fail the 4ghz test, and are rated at 3.8, despite being more than good enough for 4ghz, but they have to avoid nasty bad batches.
But, if it is running faster than the 'advertised' 'speed' (deliberate use of ''s) then you could assume it was overclocking / nefarious activity.
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