So they added the trick between when you first got the MB and when you bought a new one? Or did this happen after you updated the bios? I'm concerned because I too bought an Asus.

A few remarks:

* Not everyone has a fancy cooling, phase change cooler, water cooler and knowledge, so don’t be selfish. In some rigs 0.05v is nothing, but in some cases, it can be too much! Newbies are buying these motherboards as well, don't forget that.

* ~ means around to, we took average readings and sometimes the voltage almost reached to 0.1v.

* Not all the CPUs have a good overclocking ability, some CPUs can handle overvoltage and some can’t.

* If other manufacturers are also doing the same thing, it still doesn’t mean its right.

It is my impression that this is a "feature" of all Asus Deluxe motherboards. I have 2 A8R32-MVP Deluxe motherboards in my systems now and they both run perfectly at 1.35V, and slightly hot on Auto. So yeah I'd have to agree with your suspicion that Asus did this primarilly to get better benchmark scores. And since many sites have taken to buying some products for review (so they get representative samples), Asus and done it to all of these boards.

Interesting article, but................

You're saying that the total increase in voltage to the CPU was .05 ? And that this very small iincrease in voltage was enough to cause complete system instabaility? To the point of casuing a BSoD? Did you take any other samples of system status along the way?

There are so many examples of how motherboard compaines are "cheating" to get their numbers on top in a round-up. PEG LINK mode is only the icing on the cake. If Gigabye is complaining, it's only becusae ASUS used the PEG LINK mode name first. Gigabyte does in fact have their own routine very similar.

What needs to be done is a complete system sampling. You know your front side bus should be 200, but how far above the 'default' is it? It's not uncommon for manufacturers to fudge the FSB a little on the high side to win the Megahurtz war. Same for the north bridge - With Intel systems, they can force a lower boot strap to get higher bandwidth, but at the expense of high-end overclocking.

Overclocking involves more than just pushing the volage up a mere .05 volts. And if you were going for an overclock, a mere .05 volts wouldn't make enough difference. In your overclocking success or the amount of heat generated.

Just my humble opinon

Khaotic: yes, it is my understanding that .05 IS a big deal. This is sensative equipment, after all. .05 volts too much can fry memory, so it's only reasonable that it can cause some instablility... especially with high-end cpu's such as the FX-55 (what the reviewer seems to be useing)



Regeneration: I was wondering what the deal was. My cpu seems to be running hotter than I thought it should, maybe this is happening to me too.

Is it reasonable to believe that this is true accross the the board for this model mobo? If so, is is safe for me to try out 1.35 and see how my machine runs? Is there a good way to test this? (I saw you breifly mention prime in another post. Link?)

thx

The best way to monitor your voltages is with a dmm. If you know nothing about electronics/dmm, you can reduce the vcore and use a utility called Prime95 to test the stability of your CPU.

Dyre and Rege nice job my brothers

Heated and full of debate I love it

It depends on the CPU core, environment, cooling, case, room temperature and even country. I have here some CPUs that can handle even more 0.2v without problems. There are many systems that will crash even if you will add just 0.01v. The CPUs today are using 1.0-1.4v unlike the past, so 0.05v is pretty a lot in percentage.

I've never had a BSOD and nxsensor shows a corea voltage of 1.328v and coreb voltage as 0?! Same with speedfan which shows core1 1.33 and core2 as 0! What is up with these readings? Do they not refer to the CPU cores? As far as I know both cores are working.

I beg to differ. Now I wasn't saying that .05V was causing BSOD in my case, and that's really not what Regen was saying either. It is, however, an overvoltage condition and if a person's cooling is less than stellar it could lead to instability.

Now I understand why Asus is doing this. Their Deluxe motherboards have a series of Auto-Overclocking features, and they know those won't work "as well" with just stock voltage. Now the catch is that they've done this and it appears they've tried to cover their tracks. That is were it has the potential to generate issues for people.

Say I'm a person who wants to Overclock my system a bit. I've figured out that if I bump the voltage by 0.05V my X2 won't have a melt-down, when I'm working it hard and the room temperature just happens to rise a bit above normal. So if I don't know about this I might to run it like that, and regardless of whether you realize it, X2s are sensitive to voltage. (So maybe .05V is fine, but for allot of them 0.1V is high without watercooling.) So I go and leave my computer folding while I sack out for the night, and it overheats. The system might just shut down and not do much harm. Or it might be just the wrong tweak and that CPU will never run quite right again.