ASUS P7P55D Deluxe Lynnfield Motherboard Review

Auto Overclocking Results

Ten years ago, motherboard manufacturers looked upon overclockers with a level of scorn usually reserved for red-headed step-children. Today, they are offering to do the overclocking for us...what a change!

Automatic overclocking solutions are nothing new, most of us have encountered them in one way or another for quite a few years now. However, they have historically been shockingly ineffective. They either a) didn't work as advertised and locked up your system, or b) worked as advertised and locked up your system. Either way, they were not a joy to use and the results were inevitably disappointing.

On the P7P55D series motherboards, ASUS have unveiled two new auto-overclocking solutions that they believe will drastically change people's perception of 'hands off' overclocking. Utilizing the new TurboV EVO real-time overclocking processor, they promise easier and higher auto-overclocking results. Can they deliver? Let's find out.

BIOS - OC Tuner

The OC Tuner utility can be found within the Ai Tweaker tab in the BIOS, and it offers three different overclocking profiles. We automatically selected the Turbo option, because...well...we're hardcore like that. Upon hitting OK, the system would reboot, then load up to the P.O.S.T screen for less than one second, and then reboot again, continuing this quick cycle for approximately 60 seconds (although ASUS claims that it can take up to about 3-5 minutes). Once OC Tuner is finished doing its magic, it will boot into your operating system as normal. At that point, we recommend running your preferred suite of benchmarking and stress testing utilities just to ensure that everything is nice and stable. Our experience with this solution was essentially flawless, we encountered no issues to speak of, and as you can see above the results were quite impressive. Admittedly, the OC Tuner is a little too tame at overclocking the memory, but nothing's perfect.

We realize that CPU-Z, PC Probe II, and TurboV EVO are all reporting different vCore readings and that is largely because OC Tuner doesn't set a static vCore. Instead, the vCore fluctuates based on the processor load, topping out at approximately 1.35V under full load and falling to 1.06V at idle, and some programs are faster then others at refreshing voltage readouts.

Our only real gripe with this solution is that it resets all the settings in the BIOS, so the full screen logo gets re-enabled, the onboard devices that you may have disabled (audio/FireWire/Serial Port) get re-enabled, etc. It's a minor inconvenience, but you can manually re-disable them again if you wish. ASUS are aware of this issue, and they likely rectify in a future BIOS release. Speaking of BIOS releases, if you want the best possible results, you will want to stay up-to-date with your BIOS, since ASUS' engineers are constantly fine tuning this solution to improve the results.

TurboV EVO - Auto Tuning

The Auto Tuning automatic overclocking feature is a software-based solution that can be found within the new & improved TurboV EVO utility.

Once you enlarge the above TurboV image, you can see that Auto Tuning has two modes, Performance and Extreme. At this point in time, ASUS advises that people use the performance preset since that is where the most work has been done in optimizing the algorithm and stability testing. However, as you can see, our results paled by comparison to the above OC Tuner solution. Furthermore, this method took more than 30 minutes, and on at least one occassion resulted in a system freeze.

Now no one in ther right mind is going to criticize a free automatic 757Mhz overclock on an i5-750, or a 521Mhz overclock on an i7-870, but the fact of the matter is that the OC Tuner solution destroyed the TurboV EVO-based Auto Tuning method, both in terms final overclock and swiftness. We still definitely have to applaud ASUS for both implementations though, clearly the TurboV EVO overclocking processor is not a gimmick, and we can't wait to see how much better it gets over time.