ASUS P7F7-E WS SuperComputer (3450 Express) Motherboard (Page 4)

BIOS

The BIOS on the P7F7-E WS follows the AMI layout as usual. Also as usual are the heavy overclocking features that ASUS stuffs into the board. These are found on the AI Tweaker Page.

Inside the AI Tweaker page are a few sub menus that give you greater control over your CPU and memory.

There are also some pretty cool fan options in the BIOS. Along with the auto controls, ASUS has added in some manual ones that are very nice.

Overclocking

Overclocking the P7F7-E WS was as easy as overclocking any ASUS board. As per our usual methods, we started with the "CPU LevelUP!" to get our base. From there we pushed forward until we finally hit a high of 185 x 22 for a recorded stable clock of 4.083GHz. The voltages to achieve this were pretty mild in comparison to some of the other boards we have tinkered with. The CPU was only at 1.38V and CPU PLL are also low at 1.9V.

You can see the validation for our overclock here.

It is pretty impressive to have this type of overclocking headroom on a professional level board. Normally overclocking is left out completely.

TurboV EVO

The ASUS TurboV is probably my favorite overclocking software. It is simple, clean and powerful. The only thing that it lacks is the ability to drop the memory multiplier using the manual clocking tools. I am sure there is a reason for this omission, but it would be nice to see it in a future revision of the software.

Here you can see your system status at a glance as well as overclock the CPU, memory and GPU fairly quickly.

Included with the overclocking tools is also an easy tool to get your CPU moving. This is the CPU LevelUP feature.

The last item on the TurboV list is the Turbo Key utility. Here you can set a key stroke pattern to automatically enable a present OC.

As all overclocking results are dependent on the hardware you use, your results may vary. Results of our overclocking tests are included in the performance section with the stock scores. It is also important to point out that when overclocking memory performance may vary greatly due to different memory multipliers. As such there is no real "apples to apples" comparison. We include the overclocked performance to show the potential performance you can get form pushing the boards we have in hand.

Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time of testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we weren't able to tweak the motherboard to the absolute maximum and find the highest possible FSB, as this could take days to find properly. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking or as new BIOS updates are released. "Burn-in" time might also come into play if you believe in that.