drop your chipset temp by 4-5 °C w/ a BIOS setting

I recently started to remove the "auto" setting from some of the user configurable voltages in my P5B-Del and noticed that not only is my system stable to 2x orthos for >2 h (and still counting, I'll probably stop it after 6), but the "system or chipset" temp as measured by speedfan (Winbond W83627DHG sensor array) has dropped as well which to me means the auto settings were very likely over-volting one or more of these numbers just like it did to the vcore on my CPU before I manually set that too.

http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/1107/voltagefd6.gif

Anyway, the last time I did a 2x orthos stress test, room temp was about 72 °F (it's 71 now) and the "system" temp as measured by speedfan was 42-43 °C after 2 h. Now it's 37-38 °C which is an easy 4-5 °C cooler. It was 37 for the majority of the test and just recently went up to 38. I'm running a q6600 @ 9x333 with a CPU vcore of 1.3250v. The other settings are set to their minimum values:

Code:

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FSB Term. voltage: 1.2v
NB vcore: 1.25v
SB vcore: 1.5v
ICH Chipset voltage: 1.057v

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In case you don't know, orthos is a great app to find minimum stable voltage settings since it will stop and report an error if the math doesn't = known values.

Conclusion: don't leave your voltages set to auto, at least with a P5B-Deluxe, if you want to minimize your system temps.

Thats good advice.

This reminds me actually, I need to lower my chipset temps a few degrees. I read somewhere online, that the more of your BIOS features you can disable, the cooler it will become. Stuff like S.M.A.R.T and power on LAN and whatever... all those things all stress the chipset and motherboard if only very slightly. But if you can do without a bunch of them, it can lower your temps a bit.

So I should do some house cleaning in there and try to disable anything I dont need. See if I can get a few degrees off its temp.

Only thing is, lowering it too much makes your computer unstable, if you only lower one voltage, you know what is causing the lockup/reboot, but if you lower many voltages, it is a lot harder to troubleshoot.

Motherboard makers made sure the cooling is adequate for that particular chipset, make it cooler have not much use at all. Consider even the most power-hungry chipset use 20W at most, you might as well not bother to save 2W of heat or so, and cause some instability to your system.

The other thing to remember is that everyones system is different, auto will be designed to be stable for most situations.

If overclocking, you will probably find that you lose stability by doing this, but its just a case of trial and error.

Yeah, trial and error. Change one at a time, stress test 4-5 hours, then move onto the next. Mine ran for nearly 6 h before I stopped it. No errors so I'm calling it good.

Your NB temps seem quite high. Have you tried taking off the NB heatsink and having a look?

I have seen people recommend this on other forums aswell with Asus motherboards. On Auto, Asus motherboards do tend to overvolt components even when at stock, which isnt necessarily good or bad as long as it is still stable, but it does increase temps a bit.
If you have gt the time to set voltages manually and test stability, it is probably worth it and you will probably learn some stuff on the way aswell. However, if you dont have the time then its perfectly ok to leave everything at auto (like me) :) I think that if I was overclocking though, I would prefer to set voltages manually so that I know exactly what is changing and I have more control over the mobo.

4-5 Hours of SP2004 is not gonna be enough, chipset stability not just dependent on CPU/Ram. USB / Network / SATA could mess up when undervolting.

when I undervolted my NF4 chipset back then, it caused all sort of ata errors / BSOD when I stress 4~6 IDE and SATA drives (shuffling files around)

how would you go about finding what voltage your chipset should be?

Is there a stress test for graphics cards? I've had my GTS locking up a few times...???

You could use 3dmark.

rthdrbl is probably the best at stressing graphics cards, think it stresses gfx slightly more than 3dmark