BIOS/Overclocking

Like the P4C800 Deluxe, the P4P800 Deluxe utilizes the AMI BIOS interface. It’s a bit different to get used to, especially if you’re coming from Award’s popular interface, but offers a wealth of tweaking options for enthusiasts to dive into. We’re going to start our discussion of the P4P800 Deluxe BIOS on its most talked about feature: Memory Acceleration Mode (MAM).

BIOS Main Menu

Advanced Menu

Locking the memory bus ratio

Memory Acceleration Mode, or MAM, is what ASUS’ marketing department likens to Intel’s Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) found in 875P. We’re unconvinced that this is PAT at work here, but ASUS has certainly come up with a way to accomplish something similar without the use of 875P. Found under the “Chipset” menu, MAM can be turned off by selecting “auto” or toggled on by implementing the “enabled” setting. All of our tests were conducted with MAM enabled unless otherwise noted.

While MAM is busy stealing all the headlines, the real gem of the P4P800 Deluxe BIOS is still the “Turbo” performance mode setting. This is a feature that has been present in various ASUS motherboards for years, and brings a nice performance improvement once enabled. We’ve provided scores with and without the turbo performance mode so you can see the improvement for yourself.

AI Overclocking options

Voltage tweaking

AGP frequency lock

The rest of the P4P800 Deluxe BIOS is fairly interesting. First, ASUS offers their AI Overclock Tuner, which will automatically overclock your system by 5, 10, 20, or 30%. This is probably a nice feature for inexperienced users that don’t want to delve into the inner workings of overclocking, but power users will still want to do things manually. Fortunately the P4P800 Deluxe BIOS has everything you’ll need.

For manual bus speed adjustment, settings range from 100-400MHz in 1MHz increments, offering tons of options for the enthusiasts out there who wish to overclock their P4P800 Deluxe system. The memory bus and AGP/PCI frequencies can be locked at specific speeds, another must-have item for successful overclocking. And while the original P4P800 Deluxe BIOS was limited to just 1.7V for CPU core voltage adjustment, the latest 1006 release offers settings up to a whopping 1.95V in 0.025V increments.

Chipset Menu with MAM

Submenu

Offering settings up to 1.95V is actually probably a little too aggressive, as an excessive amount of voltage can actually damage your processor. If you need more than 1.85V of juice to get your processor stable, you probably need to tone the settings down a bit.

DDR voltage settings of 2.55, 2.65, 2.75, and 2.85V are also available, while AGP voltages of 1.5V, 1.6V, 1.7V, and 1.8V are also offered.

Besides these settings, everything else is pretty much standard fare. You’ve got options for adjusting memory timings and hardware monitoring, which is one area ASUS goes one step beyond others thanks to Q-Fan. Q-Fan can dynamically adjust the speed of fans within your system depending on temperature. Obviously this is a great option to have if you want to keep noise level to a minimum.

Overclocking

We were able to hit bus speeds as high as 275MHz with our P4P800 Deluxe board. That’s an effective 1.1GHz bus speed folks! Keep in mind that while this sounds impressive, you’ll always get the best performance when your memory bus and system bus are operating synchronously, just like the nForce2 and 875P chipsets. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to find DDR memory that will run at 275MHz, but we’re sure many memory manufacturers are trying.

In any case, those of you who planned on pairing the P4P800 Deluxe with a 2.4C Pentium 4 processor should know in advance that running your system bus at 250MHz (for a 3GHz CPU, 1.0GHz effective system bus) but with the memory bus running at 200MHz will result in lower performance than running a true 3.0C/200MHz bus/200MHz memory combination.