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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?
Saves me the trouble
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
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.
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,
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.
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.
Who writes this stuff? This is very very old news. MSI began this stuff http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030522/
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.
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"
> 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.
1964 called and they asked for their lame counter-replies back.
1957 called and wants their genetic material back.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
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
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.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
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.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Wait, so on one hand, the overclocking doens't provide a measurable speed increase for games. But then somehow it *does* make a measurable difference in benchmarks. Man, that's +5 insightful. :(
Besides that little contradiction, there's the issue of temperature fluctuations in a typical household being discussed right before the concept of 60Hz hum in a server room. Server rooms are not temperatue controlled like Jim Bob's trailer home - they're generally pretty tightly regulated to always be below the point where temperature fluctuations make a difference. Take it fromsomeone who works in a jacket half the time.
The idea of 60Hz hum causing instability in a modern computer system is just silly. For some reading that might be useful, do a google search for "faraday cage", then try to draw a parallel between that concept and the big grounded metal box around a computer, and the smaller grounded metal box around the power supply. Then do some reading on power system design in the context of corporate server rooms, and maybe some reading on emissions from two and three phase wiring. The problem is dealt with.
The chips that are being overclocked are being run outside of their specified range. Period. That negates any guarantee of stability that the manufacturer makes. 2MHz or 20 MHz, it doesn't matter - it's out of spec and isn't guaranteed to work right. Sure, it "might" work alright "most" of the time, and it "might" have worked fine for Joe User with one machine running Windows - which crashes randomly anyway.
But the thing is, Joe User doesn't spend millinons of dollars in testing to see how fast their stuff can run. My employer - a major chip manufacturer - does, as do the other major chip manufacturers. I guarantee you, if our chips were 100% reliable every time at a few MHz faster, we'd market them that way. Being faster than "the other guy" is rather important to us.
BTW, ASUS stuff *is* cheap hardware. There's a whole world outside of "stuff you can purchase at Best Buy".
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.
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.
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.
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
Well, if I'm not crazy - I recall drive mfg saying 1MB=1,000,000 bytes. Figured like that (assuming i can get my math right) gives me 55.9 GB after conversion to real GB.
Then, don't forget - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q140365/ the cluster overhead and some format overhead for the duplicate MFT etc...
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3