Silence & Overclocking
You probably already grasped that the only current motherboard with a satisfying bios (and because we don’t have any other choices) is the P4P800 SE. So we mainly used that one for the last part of the article. It is important to point out two very useful utilities: EIST and ClockGen, developed by Franck Delattre.
The first one gives access to processor SpeedStep adjustments under Windows and a possibility of immediately changing (without rebooting) the voltage and multiplying coefficients. The second one offers the possibility of changing the bus processor’s speed.
Other software can also be useful. The SpeedStep that initially did not work with a Desktop motherboard,
RMClock allows the possibility of changing frequency and voltage (within an interval defined by the user) according to the load. The thing is that, even if this function is very useful on a laptop in order to save some energy, it is less useful with a desktop, especially with a processor that is easy to cool down silently even at full load. Another one
Speedfan will offer the possibility of reducing the fan speed with a motherboard such as the P4P800 SE.
It is important to point out that at its initial speed, without being really noisy, it isn’t really discreet either. SpeedFan gives the opportunity of reducing the fan rotation speed to 25% and with this reduction we have to admit that we couldn’t hear the fan’s blowing sound …but the engine sound unfortunately was still quite audible. So, because of this noise, such a reduction is useless and it is best to increase it to approximately 40% to have an equivalent fan and engine sound level.
Here are a couple of temperatures measured with via ASUS Probe in load under Prime95 with the fan voltage at 12V / 5V.
P-M 2.0 GHz (1.34V) : 44 / 48°C
- P-M 2.0 @ 2.4 GHz (1.34V) : 47 / 51°C
- P-M 2.0 @ 2.6 GHz (1.45V) : 50 / 55°C
Even in Overclocking and with a lower voltage, the fan is able to keep the temperature low. For the Overclocking and despite the possibility of increasing the processor voltage, we were unable to reach much higher frequencies with our Pentium M 755 (2.0 GHz / FSB400) already used for the DFI motherboard test: 2.5 GHz with the initial 1.34 V and 2.6 GHz with 1.45V. This Overclocking has been stabilized and validated in use.
The other interesting point is the processor FSB increases with the platform. With the Pentium M 755, we were unable to reach beyond an FSB of 180 MHz with a stable configuration, whereas with the 740 we managed to reach 215 MHz. So it seems to confirm that the Pentium M FSB533 is more inclined to work with higher FSB.
We were able to reach this FSB under Windows via Clockgen, but from 200 MHz upwards we had inexplicable 3D graphic bugs with some of the games, even when the AGP frequency was locked in. Furthermore, the system didn’t want to boot with this FSB directly configured via the bios.
