Overclocking
Though TurboV is good, I get my satisfaction by overclocking the good ol’ way…in the BIOS. LGA 1156 makes for some of the easiest overclocking ever, you can get pretty much all the overclocking you need by raising the BCLK and the CPU voltage. Oh, there are some other tweaks like enabling Load-Line Calibration that I always use, but it is very basic.
I have to mention again how pleasurable the Target Frequency is to use. As you raise the BCKL, the display shows the resulting CPU clock.
Don’t misunderstand me…this isn’t MY idea. Most Asus boards that I received in the past possessed this feature, but this is the first Asus board I have received in many months with it. In defense of Asus…most companies have never had it and still don’t.
The P7H55D-M allows for sync or unsync of the CPU and GPU. I did not want to raise the GPU clock, and disabling sync was short work.
I settled on an overclock of 4.28gHz, a 28.5% overclock. Everything was plenty stable and I could have gone farther, but I just received this CPU and I always like to get comfortable with a processor before trying to get the max overclock. Besides, I feel that the primary use of the Core i5 661 is for HTPC rigs and non-gaming rigs, and most of them will not be overclocked.
Over the past two months I’ve been pursuing a problem w/ASUS…
BEWARE: if you get a case that has an eSATA front port and you connect it to an internal motherboard [Intel H55 and maybe others] SATA port, it cannot be configured to have an eSATA hard drive ‘safely removed’. You will have to turn off caching (slow) or risk data corruption when removing it.
ASUS customer service is terrible and it will further adversely affect their bottom line because they are ruining their reputation. …So much for their “goal of 100% customer satisfaction”.
They ½-answer submitted technical inquiries to show they care, even though it is obvious they do not want to get to the root of or appropriately solve a problem system builders may be encountering and finding annoying. They do not seem to know Windows very well nor comprehend the underlying problem, nor do they spend any measurable time even reading the history of the problem, trying to determine where the problem really lies. They defer simple system builders to Microsoft $upport when it is clearly not a Microsoft problem. Concurrently they defer to Intel support (the maker of the chip/driver likely causing this problem and a company not selling chips to/supporting end-users) – when ASUS should be contacting Intel themselves, as an integration partner, to resolve issues such as this.
Over the past two months I’ve been pursuing a problem w/ASUS…
BEWARE: if you get a case that has an eSATA front port and you connect it to an internal motherboard [Intel H55 and maybe others] SATA port, it cannot be configured to have an eSATA hard drive ‘safely removed’. You will have to turn off caching (slow) or risk data corruption when removing it.
ASUS customer service is terrible and it will further adversely affect their bottom line because they are ruining their reputation. …So much for their “goal of 100% customer satisfaction”.
They ½-answer submitted technical inquiries to show they care, even though it is obvious they do not want to get to the root of or appropriately solve a problem system builders may be encountering and finding annoying. They do not seem to know Windows very well nor comprehend the underlying problem, nor do they spend any measurable time even reading the history of the problem, trying to determine where the problem really lies. They defer simple system builders to Microsoft $upport when it is clearly not a Microsoft problem. Concurrently they defer to Intel support (the maker of the chip/driver likely causing this problem and a company not selling chips to/supporting end-users) – when ASUS should be contacting Intel themselves, as an integration partner, to resolve issues such as this.