Hello,
Today I am pleased to announce what "Exactly" ASUS's PEG LINK technology does....
First I have to say that its quite nice and offers exactly what ASUS says...."PEG Link is a BIOS-based feature. It offers five settings: Auto, Slow, Normal, Fast and Faster. Users can select the right speed to bring out the true potential of their PCI-Express graphics cards."
Yeah, yeah, I know everyone already knows this.....But what isn't know is the nature of the PEG beast.....
The biggest question I have had of the "PEG" is to what degree does it overclock my GPU and with what settings under the bios?
First i started out with my P5AD2 Premium back in September....
At the time(and still today) there was no information about the settings and the only way I was able to tell if it was working was by benchmarking 5 million times with various utilities....
So thats exactly what I did....
Using PCMARK04 has been my preference mainly because of ASUS's contest that they were running (BTW I WON A PDA FORM THAT CONTEST)...and I found it to be a better all around solution for stability testing than anything else....
Under the PEG Link settings in the Bios The main setting I focused on was "PEG Link Mode" which offers:
Auto, Slow, Normal, Fast and Faster for settings options....
With the P5AD2 Premium I was able to see a difference of +50 Points between the "Auto"(which is also the normal setting) and the "Faster" setting....but nothing really conclusive about the other settings....So I basically accepted what I saw and was happy i even saw any improvment.....
I know this does not tell you or me anything but nothing really....but wait theres more...
So The P5AD2-E Premium comes out on 01 November.....
This is where it gets interesting.....
Since it was reported that a lot of issues had been addressed and fixed with the 925XE based, especially the clock locking issue, I decided this was the board for me....
After purchasing it and playing around with it, I discovered that the "PEG Link" technology on my P5AD2 Premium was either broken or totally different than what I was seeing with the P5AD2-E Premium....I'll explain....
While testing the new mb out with PCMARK04 I ran into a problem....
With the "PEG Link Mode" option set to Faster The graphics tests were failing miserably....Lock-up after Lock-up.....FAILURE
I couldn't put my finger on it....So I thought maybe I was OC'ing the GPU to much with ATI TOOL v.22... so I set the 2D and 3D settings under ATI TOOL to "disabled" and set everyting else to default.....Rebooted.....And What did I find when I opened ATI tool up....MY GPU and MEM speed was 540/540MHZ.....WTF
I thought to myself what the HELL did I break now.....Maybe ATI Tool was not compatible with me setup....
So I closed ATI Tool and proceeded to run through a PCmark test again, thinking everything would be cool now.....NOPE.....CRASH 'n' BURN
This time I pulled up the System Details from within PCmark and found that it also displayed my GPU speed as 540mhz and My MEM speed as 540mhz.....
WTF....
Going into the bios I set the PEG LINK MODE to normal and rebooted....
ATI Tool now reads 499.50/499.50
PCMARK now reads 499.50/499.50
These are the default speed settings for my X800 XT
DO YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING NOW?
To make a longer story short.....
PEG Link Mode: AUTO = 526.50/526.50mhz
SLOW = default speeds
NORMAL = default speeds
FAST = 526.50/526.50mhz ----> roughly a 5% OC
FASTER = 540/540mhz --------> roughly a 8% OC
Ther you have it folks.....
NOTE: The reason why I think the P5AD2 Premium PEG Link Mode is broken is simply because the FASTER setting did not give me any trouble in the bench tests.....
Any question?
thanks
SkI
Today I am pleased to announce what "Exactly" ASUS's PEG LINK technology does....
First I have to say that its quite nice and offers exactly what ASUS says...."PEG Link is a BIOS-based feature. It offers five settings: Auto, Slow, Normal, Fast and Faster. Users can select the right speed to bring out the true potential of their PCI-Express graphics cards."
Yeah, yeah, I know everyone already knows this.....But what isn't know is the nature of the PEG beast.....
The biggest question I have had of the "PEG" is to what degree does it overclock my GPU and with what settings under the bios?
First i started out with my P5AD2 Premium back in September....
At the time(and still today) there was no information about the settings and the only way I was able to tell if it was working was by benchmarking 5 million times with various utilities....
So thats exactly what I did....
Using PCMARK04 has been my preference mainly because of ASUS's contest that they were running (BTW I WON A PDA FORM THAT CONTEST)...and I found it to be a better all around solution for stability testing than anything else....
Under the PEG Link settings in the Bios The main setting I focused on was "PEG Link Mode" which offers:
Auto, Slow, Normal, Fast and Faster for settings options....
With the P5AD2 Premium I was able to see a difference of +50 Points between the "Auto"(which is also the normal setting) and the "Faster" setting....but nothing really conclusive about the other settings....So I basically accepted what I saw and was happy i even saw any improvment.....
I know this does not tell you or me anything but nothing really....but wait theres more...
So The P5AD2-E Premium comes out on 01 November.....
This is where it gets interesting.....
Since it was reported that a lot of issues had been addressed and fixed with the 925XE based, especially the clock locking issue, I decided this was the board for me....
After purchasing it and playing around with it, I discovered that the "PEG Link" technology on my P5AD2 Premium was either broken or totally different than what I was seeing with the P5AD2-E Premium....I'll explain....
While testing the new mb out with PCMARK04 I ran into a problem....
With the "PEG Link Mode" option set to Faster The graphics tests were failing miserably....Lock-up after Lock-up.....FAILURE
I couldn't put my finger on it....So I thought maybe I was OC'ing the GPU to much with ATI TOOL v.22... so I set the 2D and 3D settings under ATI TOOL to "disabled" and set everyting else to default.....Rebooted.....And What did I find when I opened ATI tool up....MY GPU and MEM speed was 540/540MHZ.....WTF
I thought to myself what the HELL did I break now.....Maybe ATI Tool was not compatible with me setup....
So I closed ATI Tool and proceeded to run through a PCmark test again, thinking everything would be cool now.....NOPE.....CRASH 'n' BURN
This time I pulled up the System Details from within PCmark and found that it also displayed my GPU speed as 540mhz and My MEM speed as 540mhz.....
WTF....
Going into the bios I set the PEG LINK MODE to normal and rebooted....
ATI Tool now reads 499.50/499.50
PCMARK now reads 499.50/499.50
These are the default speed settings for my X800 XT
DO YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING NOW?
To make a longer story short.....
PEG Link Mode: AUTO = 526.50/526.50mhz
SLOW = default speeds
NORMAL = default speeds
FAST = 526.50/526.50mhz ----> roughly a 5% OC
FASTER = 540/540mhz --------> roughly a 8% OC
Ther you have it folks.....
NOTE: The reason why I think the P5AD2 Premium PEG Link Mode is broken is simply because the FASTER setting did not give me any trouble in the bench tests.....
Any question?
thanks
SkI