Asus A7N8X-X - Asus A7N8X-X
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The BIOS
Asus has been using the Award BIOS ever since, well, forever. It is easy to use but cannot compete with the Abit SoftMenu III. I happen to like the Asus BIOS because they put everything that is adjustable and tweakable under one tab. Under that one section are two to three other sub-sections that give further detailed tweaking adjustments.
The main menu of the overclocking section part of the BIOS has the CPU external frequency selection. This allows the users to set the stock FSB of the CPU they've chosen to use for their system. This is pretty much loading fail proof defaults. Underneath is the multiplier selection. The selection varies from 6.5 - 17. Check the overclocking section of the review for the overclocking results.
There is also a selection to run your memory asynchronous to your FSB. While this helps for Intel systems, AMD is better off running memory at synchronous speeds. With the ability to change multipliers, raising FSB to as high as possible with good memory will give overall best performance on an AMD system. To do so, run the memory frequency at 100% and not 200%. This will cause the memory to run at DOUBLE the selected FSB. Doing so will highly cause your memory to fry.
These are the memory timings selections. Running these settings as low as possible give better system performance; although I have heard in some cases where setting the Clock Cycle to 7 or 11 will yield highest memory bandwidth. It all depends on the motherboard you have. It's better to test them out before you take my advice.
The choices for VCore top out at 1.85v. This is the usual max voltage that motherboards allow. Higher VCore may be required for some serious overclocking. It is nice to see that there is VAGP up to 1.7v, but is there such a need? There might be a need to raise the VAGP if the AGP bus gets too high, but since there is an AGP bus lock, I find this option to be useless. There are VDimm adjustments of up to 2.8v. While I recommend running 2.7v for every day use, I personally run my main system at 2.8v every single day, 24/7.
Test Setup
AMD Athlon XP2100+
Asus A7N8X-X (nForce unified drivers v2.45)
Asus A7V8X (Hyperion 4in1 Drivers v4.49)
2x 256MB Kingston HyperX PC3200 2-2-3-6
Sapphire Radeon 9500 non-pro (ATI Catalyst 3.6)
Maxtor 30GB 7200RPM ATA133
Swiftech MCX462+ w/ 80mm Delta fan
Antec case with 420w Vantec Power Supply
Pioneer DVD
Overclocking Results
Since the A7N8X-X officially supports 200FSB, I immediately dropped my multipliers and went straight for it. I was greeted with a no boot once I dropped the multiplier to 10x. I knew that it wasn't the CPU that was limiting me, since my XP2100+ had been quite successful in overclocking in many different boards. I then cleared CMOS and tried to go for 10.5x. Once again, there was no boot. A third attempt and I was able to boot with 11x. Not having the essential 10x and 10.5x multipliers can be very lacking as many overclockers choose the infamous XP1700+. With a multiplier of 11x, I began raising the FSB. My XP2100+ maxes out at around 2.4GHZ so I know I have some room to play with. Slowly raising FSB, I reached the maximum of the board in a matter of seconds. The highest FSB I was able to achieve was a mere 205FSB. My memory couldn't be the factor of a higher overclock since it reaches well beyond 230FSB. My CPU had plenty of room to work with. What could it be? The motherboard had already reached its max. With an overclock of a mere 205FSB, I was quite disappointed. It wasn't over yet. I figured that since my FSB had reached its limits, I can raise the multiplier even higher to gain a higher overclock. Once again I was greeted with a no boot using 11.5x. With so many multipliers restricted, overclocking the A7N8X-X was hideous.
My HIGHEST OVERCLOCK achieved to run performance and gaming benchmarks was:
11 x 205FSB = 2.26GHZ
*Note: I didn't believe that 205FSB was the highest the chipset would allow, so I found myself the Uber1005 BIOS and flashed it. Keep in mind that this is a beta BIOS and that both Asus and OCA do not take any responsibilities whatsoever with the use of this beta BIOS. The purpose of mentioning this is that after flashing to the Uber BIOS, I was able to reach a max of 210FSB. Still not quite good enough for me, but it was definitely higher.
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