BIOS: 1004 Beta

Both of the Asus boards, the P5GD2 with 915P and the P5AD2 with 925X, proved to be quite mature and clearly geared towards overclocking. While we reached 265 MHz FSB with the Gigabyte boards, we were able to get nearly 270 MHz with the Asus board. The P5AD2 could be booted up with 283 MHz max, and the P5GD2 couldn't take more than 280 MHz max - and neither ran particularly stably at these clock speeds. For the benchmarks, we decided to use a 280 MHz clock, which led to a memory clock of 374 MHz, or in other words DDR2 748. This meant that we were just short of the 7000 MB/s border for real memory throughput.

The overclocking options are not as extensive as with the Abit board, but they still led to a remarkable result. In any case, the Abit board leaves its rivals in the dust when it comes to the accessories included. We were unable to get the package's contents back to its original state and ended up putting everything in another box for simplicity's sake.