Automatic Overclocking?

After checking both motherboards using CPU-Z at a variety of clock speeds, we found something truly astounding. We discovered that ASUS was 'magically' overclocking the P5AD2 Premium's FSB by 2MHz across the board!

When we set the FSB speed to 200MHz, ASUS actually overclocked the P5AD2 motherboard's FSB to 202MHz. Setting it to 201MHz in the BIOS resulted in an actual FSB speed of 203MHz, and the trend continued as we increased the FSB speed.

In other words, the ASUS P5AD2 Premium has an automatic 2MHz advantage over the ABIT AW8-MAX (as well as other motherboards in the market)! Naturally, this is quite unfair.

An increase of 2MHz may not sound like much, but it's reflected in both processor and memory clock speeds as well. For example, in our Pentium 4 630 testbed, that meant an increase in processor clock speed of about 33MHz as well as a boost in memory speed of about 3.3MHz.

Take a look at the CPU-Z screenshot below.

ASUS P5AD2 Premium @ 200MHz FSB

However, ASUS did not stop at just overclocking the memory bus. The BIOS also changed the memory timings at 200MHz and above.

ASUS P5AD2 Premium @ 200MHz FSB

Even though the memory timings of 4-4-4-12 were used, ASUS tweaked the timings to 4-3-3-8 instead! That would definitely improve the P5AD2 Premium's benchmark scores further.