P7P55D Deluxe, don't want to overclock, BIOS question

[cwerdna]

I just finished putting together a P7P55D Deluxe system w/retail i7-860 (w/Zalman CNPS8700 cooler). I just updated the BIOS to the most current (1408, dated 3/25/2010). The last desktop I put together is a now creaky Athlon 64 3200+.

As crazy as this might sound, I DO NOT want to overclock. Stability and data integrity are way more important to me.

I'm a bit confused by the CMOS settings to achieve no OCing. In Ai Tweaker should I leave CPU Level Up at Auto and Ai Overclock Tuner at Auto or should I turn the latter down to Manual and leave everything else at the defaults?

Manual isn't really clear and the BIOS update has changed the UI a bit vs. the manual anyway. For good measure, I set OC Tuner to Good Performance and am not going to bother running any auto tuning nor mucking w/anything else under Ai Tweaker.

 

[Lmeow]

Well, in terms of overclocking, if you didn't touch anything, it wouldn't overclock the CPU at all, apart from Turbo Boost.

 

[EXT64]

Can you turn AI Overclock tuner off (disable)? You can also check in windows (CPU-Z) to make sure it is not OCing. Also, to check stability use bootable memtest86+ 4 and Prime95.

 

[cwerdna]

Can you turn AI Overclock tuner off (disable)? You can also check in windows (CPU-Z) to make sure it is not OCing. Also, to check stability use bootable memtest86+ 4 and Prime95.

None of the relevant Ai Tweaker settings have "disable" as a choice. For my i7-860 CPU, it lists at the top a target CPU frequency of 2793 mhz and target DRAM frequency of 1333 mhz.

CPU Level Up has choices for me of "Auto", "i7-870-2.93G", "Crazy-3.06G", "Crazy-3.366G". Ai Overclock Tuner has choices of "Manual", "Auto", "D.O.C.P.", "X.M.P." and "CPU Level Up". There are choices of Enable/Disabled for Intel Speedstep Tech and Intel TurboMode Tech, but these aren't really overclocking and are directly supported technologies (http://www.anandtech.com/show/2839).

OC Tuner has choices of "Good Performance", "BetterPerformance" and "Turbo Profile" but from the manual and verbage in the UI, it looks like that has no effect unless you start auto tuning (which I don't intend to).

Yeah, w/CPU-Z, potentially, the tricky thing is the above turbo mode.

I'm using Prime95 torture test as a test, in general.

I did submit a tech support request to Asus and they replied surprisingly quick with:

I would normally leave these settings at auto as they normally will not push the settings without the guidance from u using the software to tell it to push the limit (like aisuite which has sections to push values by percentage)
or you could elect to put them at manual and set the values to default values of your hardware which will work but is a headache as you have to research what is default. with automatics these type of boards are normally really stable.

It sure sounds like auto is ok. I wish they were more explicit in their UI about no OCing or disable.

 

[EXT64]

Yeah, go with auto. It sounds like auto means disabled (ie, the bios does nothing) however you can still use the windows programs to OC. So if you just use auto and never install/use their programs, you should have a solid un-OC'ed chip.

 

[lennyw]

Glad I finally found a like-minded colleague on line. I've been racking my brains for some months now wondering how one DOESN'T overclock, and I think what is above is correct.

Leave everything as Auto, and set the OC to Good Performance (if you're not gaming, this shouldn't give any noticeable difference). I think you'll need to run the auto tuning software to activate this setting, as I think the settings are automatically defaulted to Turbo.

After much instability, I re-installed Windows and didn't install any ASUS software. Just the latest hardware drivers. Set OC to good performance, and it's been stable since then.

Make sure your power settings are all to power always on, to stop HDDs spinning down etc (I understand that some HDDs, especially those by WD, have a limited no of spin downs before they start to fail).