ASUS Secretly Overclocking Motherboards? 229
Hubert writes "It seems that the motherboard manufacturing industry is getting a little bit too competitive now that ASUS and many other manufacturers are secretly tweaking and overclocking the motherboard in default BIOS settings." A front side bus that's a mere 2 MHz faster may not seem like much of a tweak, but it's just enough to gain an edge over the competition.
As long as it's stable (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the definition of overclocking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reference Clock (Score:4, Insightful)
the reason it's a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Suppose another motherboard was actually faster than the ASUS, but decided to not overclock. If it had overclocked like ASUS, it would have outperformed the ASUS motherboard (hypothetically speaking).
I don't think the situation is bad now, but it could end up like video cards (Nvidia vs Ati and driver optimizations). The result is that benchmarking will no longer be useful because the comparison is between an apple and orange.
Performance difference exaggerations (Score:5, Insightful)
People need to learn to read graphs. "Best" is too often judged on speed, to the exclusion of other important factors. And too often, performance graphs in magazines and articles are drawn to exaggerate the differences between the worst-performer and the best performer, when the actual performance difference may be 1% or 2%. In terms of PC performance, neglibible.
But a 2% performance improvement may make the difference between a component or system being labelled as "disappointing" and "out in front" by a lot of dumbed-down magazines and online articles.
If only people were better able to keep a sense or proportion, and view performance tests with a little more intelligence, manufacturers wouldn't be so tempted to pull silly stunts like this one.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most websites that review motherboards do it in batches, where they'll do like 10 new motherboards with whatever the new gotta have it feature is. Maybe its a new north bridge chipset, maybe its SATA (back when that was new), something like that.
The thing is though, they post multiple synthetic tests (e.g. 3DMark and PC Mark 2001) and all the results posted are the motherboards at "stock " speeds, they haven't modified them. YOU may modify them, and they will perform better, but they're trying to show you a level playing field of all the boards they're reviewing so you can compare. If one of those boards is actually overclocked (albeit 2 Mhz ain't much) and the others are at stock, it makes that board appear to have a HUGE advatange when its stock speed may not be as good as the others. So yeah...its a big deal.
Re:Speed (Score:1, Insightful)
they've been doing this for a while (Score:3, Insightful)
i always just thought it was just that the timing crystals/chips they were using were cheap and inaccurate, but i guess not. or maybe this is just the old "never attribute to malice what can be easily attributed to lazyness"
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you, a CEO of some big company?
Why yes it's bad, unethical and likely illegal.
It is bad for various reasons, one of the biggest being that you have a market leader effectively performing unqualified tweaks on the timing of various system board components. I'm fairly certain that Asus isn't doing any chip qualification tests on the components they are overclocking.
It's unethical because they are doing that to receive an unfair advantage in the highly competitive (and extremely bogus) MB performance rankings. MBs differ in performance by extremely small amounts, so a 2MHz difference is plenty to differentiate one board from another (and again, I'm not saying that this has any noticable impact on the performance of your system, other than a 1% increase in some dumb benchmark).
It's likely illegal because when Asus says it has a 400MHz system bus they are not telling the truth. That would be false advertising (I mean heck, the number is written right on the MB boxes).
But the REAL point here that is MOST disturbing is that the poster doesn't think any of this is even worth posting. THAT'S what I find most appalling. Since when is lying to gain a competitive advantage OK? It is NEVER OK.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
These sites review boards from different companies with the same chip sets. They are all going to come out almost the same! Between innumerate reviewers and innumerate readers, a lot of people come away thinking there is a real difference in the performance of these boards.
Re:What's the definition of overclocking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless the PLL in the motherboard is periodically recalibrated using (for instance) NIST, there's no way in hell that it's ever going to be accurate.
Furthermore, all of these motherboard tests are based on whatever the computer's RTC thinks is reality, but we all know that those drift all over the place. If 1 second != 1 second (and it never does, save for machines properly synchronized to NIST using NTP or somesuch), then the test is meaningless anyway.
Think about the process a bit, and you'll see that there's essentially zero control in the typical PC reviewer's test enviroment (which seems to consist, primarily, of a kitchen table and a digital camera). Components change with time and temperature and voltage, and there's no such thing as a stable consumer-grade clock.
That all being said:
If a part advertised to run at 800MHz actually appears to run at 802MHz, we're talking about an error of only
I mean: If you bought a 200 horsepower car, would you be upset if it only produces 199.50 HP? What if it actually made 200.50 HP?
0.25%
If you complained to Honda, or GM, or somesuch, do you really think you'd be taken seriously?
I mean, geez. For fuck's sake, grow up. It's one-quarter of one percent. Try measuring a "pound" of flour, or a "gallon" of milk, or a "liter" of Pepsi sometime.
("Dear Wal-Mart: I recently purchased from your store a gallon of milk. When I took it home and measured it using my graduated cylinders, I found that it was actually 1.0025 gallons, which is clearly not as advertised. Unless I happened to miss a sign reading "Milk values are specified to a tolerance of +/- 0.25%," I want my money back. Thank you.")
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
In case anyone is curious, I first thought it was a cable problem and tried 5 different sata cables from different vendors on that channel. I did full tests on the drive with every program that would run. (spinrite would not run on that system) It has an AMD Sempron 2300+, Corsair value select PC2700 256mb chip, 2 western digital first generation SATA drives 80gb 7200 rpm 8mb cache (identical).
Of course, i've tried playing with overclocking a little because I wanted to prove it was the overclocking. The corruption starts at about 2% overclocked. 1% doesn't do much at all. It could be the cheap processor or ram too. If thats so, I hope asus customers always overbuy on memory and cpus.
As for asus, i used to think they were great. Then I tried to run freebsd 5.x on an asus motherboard. I want ACPI support from my motherboard vendors. Asus doesn't feel they need to finish their ACPI support in their bioses but sadly MSI does.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Though I hate car analogies, perhaps this tie one might be appropriate. Consider a car where the speedo was deliberately calibrated to show it going 2% faster than reality. This car will have a lower 0-60 mph time in benchmark tests (probably they don't trust the car speedo in reality, ignore this...). The car isn't better, it just appears to be. And the mobo isn't better; it's misreporting its settings. A similar board with honest settings could perform as well, but the overclocking would be apparent. Both probably have the same ultimate limits when tweaked.
Stupidity alert (Score:4, Insightful)
It is completely normal to have an oscilator labeled as 200MHz (e.g. driving FSB) which has real frequency (measured) of e.g. 199.8MHz or 202MHz. That is all in tolerance, because - surprise - the exact frequency doesn't really matter for this application. What matters is stability of the frequency, that's why a crystal oscillator is used in the first place. The frequency has to be in the range permitted by the chip maker's spec and you have to be careful if you need to divide the clock somewhere to have integral ratios, but whether it is a bit higher or lower makes really no difference.
So all this brouhaha is bull - the difference between the set 201MHz and real 203MHz could very well be just that that the machine cannot set arbitrary frequency (hint - integral frequency division ..) so it sets it to the nearest integral value possible.
Of course, an evil conspiracy by ASUS is an easier explanation instead of using your own brain.
Re:As long as it's stable (Score:3, Insightful)
FWIW, I have 3 ASUS motherboards at home working right now - A7M266, A7V600, A7V600-X. I've also recommended ASUS boards to friends.
However, I've had more than one case where things being run just slightly out of spec caused instability. For example, a stick of PC2700 RAM. Should work fine in a 333MHZ FSB board - that's what it's designed for. Unfortunately, it turns out this particular stick is *very* close to spec - it runs fine at 333MHz, and starts getting intermittent errors at 335MHz.
I don't want motherboards to be running the rest of the system out of spec by default. If I want to run things out of spec, I'll do it myself.