BIOS: Overclocking

You will find the important overclocking settings grouped together on one page.


ASUS has an automated overclocking system called "A.I.". This is a great way for less experienced users to get going with overclocking without having to know all the options.


The CPU frequency can be selected between 200 and 400 MHz. This sounds like a good range to me. I doubt you will be able to maxx that out with most RD580 chips.


Even though the multiplier page shows multipliers bigger than x9 on our Venice CPU, these multipliers do not work.


The VCore options are barely ok. Together with the VCore Overvoltage option you can get up to 1.65V (1.75 with A64-FX). Ok for air coolers, but probably not enough for the rest. I wonder why the limit is there, if there is an overvoltage option there is usually a much bigger range of possible overvolting options. Let's hope for a BIOS update.


Memory voltage can be increased to 3.20V in 0.05V steps. A maximum of 3.2V is strong evidence that the 3.3V line supplies the voltage. 3.2V is ok again for most users, but the crazy Winbond BH-5 people may want more.


According to ATI there is "no need for overvoltaging [the chipset] to achieve incredible overclocking results". It is still nice to have these options here.

The "DDR Clock Skew" options are a feature to improve memory overclock stability. With these options you can slightly change the time when the clock high/low change occurs. The available range is from -900ps to +900ps. One picosecond (ps) is a one trillionth of a second (10E-12). In one picosecond the light travels only 3mm. There is another setting "Auto" which is said to improve memory compatibility.


The Radeon Xpress Configuration page has mostly options to configure the PCI-Express interface.


On this page you can change the HT Link speed which may be required if you are doing heavy overclocking. The "1 GHz" option runs the HT at x5 of the FSB (200 x 5 = 1000). If you increase the clocks now, at one point the HT bus will get too far out of spec and make the system unstable.


Here you can change the link speed of the PCI-Express graphics ports. You bought that board to run PCI-E x16 on both slots, so why would you want to run it slower? It is useful for reviewers indeed to check how big the difference between x16/x16 and x8/x8 is. We will be using that in our Crossfire tests later.