Dual Xeon Sweetness Unwrapped, The Asus PC-DL Deluxe
Date: Wednesday, December 15, 2004 Author: Robert E. Bailey aka: Rbreb13 Page: 2 of 4
The bundle that comes with the motherboard is pretty impressive. You get a lot of stuff for your money.
Asus Support CD and WinDVD Suite
4 x SATA Cables
2 x SATA Power Cables
3 x UltraDMA 100/66 IDE and Floppy Cables
1-port IEEE 1394 Module
2-port USB 2.0 Module w/Game Port
2-port S/PDIF Out Module
I/O Shield
Bag of extra jumper caps
User Manual
Before installing the motherboard I removed the Northbridge and VRM (Voltage Regulator Module) heatsinks. I then removed the TIM (Thermal Interface Material) from each of them. The Northbridge had a white silicon based TIM and the VRM had a thick blue bubble gum looking pad. I then applied a thin layer of Artic Silver Ceramique to the Northbridge and a slightly thicker layer to the VRM area. The VRM's are slightly different heights and to assure proper contact I had to use a little more Ceramique than usual. The reason I did this was the fact that all my research has shown that these chips get really hot under normal use and even hotter if you're going to overclock. Of course I'm going to overclock. For proper testing we need to see what this combination is fully capable of, don't we?
While I'm on the subject of overclocking I need to point out a few things about the PC-DL motherboard BIOS. Asus provided this board with very limited BIOS options, not at all what I'm used to seeing from them. I have no idea what they were thinking. Even the recent updates have not corrected what I see as extreme deficiencies. The BIOS has absolutely no voltage adjustments available. Yeah, you heard me! NONE!! Not for the CPU, AGP or the RAM! The only way to get more voltage for the processors or the RAM is to physically modify the motherboard. Even if you want to run this board at stock settings the lack of VDIMM adjustments really limit the RAM choices. 2.5 volts is just not enough voltage for most of the high quality modules that are available today. I hunted and searched for a week or so before I found some that I had seen worked for others. Okay, so enough of my ranting. If you're buying this board to overclock and you're not comfortable doing some rather simple mods. I'd choose another board. It does overclock fairly well at stock voltages but its nothing that can be guaranteed. It really depends on how much of an overclock you want and the components you choose.
Installation is just like any other and I ran into no problems fitting it into a full tower case.
Note: I did install the system into a mid tower case at first. But I couldn't get reasonable temperatures in such a cramped environment.
I installed it first with no mods done so we can see how it runs at stock settings. I won't bore you with all the details. I'll be using SiSoft Sandra and FutureMark's PCMark 2002 for testing purposes.
I ran some tests at stock settings and at a minor overclock just for comparisons sake. I did forget to run the Futuremark tests at this stage of the benchmarks for the 100 FSB test. Since I'm sure I'll never run at stock speeds I feel they aren't really that important anyways.
Stock settings:
In BIOS the multiplier was set to 16 and the RAM was set to Auto. I used stock voltages of 1.30. This gave me:
CPU: 1.61 GHz @ 16*100 FSB
RAM: 168 MHz for a DDR336 setting and timings of 2.5-3-3-6
SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic:
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth:
For the next tests I upped the FSB to 110 MHz.
CPU: 1.76 GHz @ 16*110 FSB
RAM: 183 MHz for a DDR366 setting and timings of 2.5-3-3-6
SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic:
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth:
PCMark 2002:
There was some improvement in the scores but nothing that you wouldn't expect from such a minor difference in settings.
For the next set of tests I had to use a jumper on the motherboard to change the way the BIOS sees the FSB. Leaving the jumper set to Auto only gives you the option of 100-132 FSB settings. By changing the jumper to the 133 FSB setting I was able to see 133-165 FSB settings in the BIOS.
Note: I'll provide links to some excellent sites for all this type of information at the end of the article. What worked for me may not work for everybody. If you have different processors or different memory things will have to be adjusted accordingly.
CPU: 2.15 GHz @ 16*134 FSB
RAM: 167 MHz for a DDR334 setting and timings of 2.5-3-3-6
