Asus Unique Features
The P7P55D EVO, as all other Asus motherboards, contains so many features that there is no way to go into them here without making this review far too long. But I always like to mention at least one that I haven’t detailed before.
Asus TurboV Evo:
TurboV Evo is Asus’ latest overclock utility. It combines software and an onboard chip to make software overclocking easier and more stable. It is comprised of two features, TurboV and Turbo Key. TurboV is the overclock utility.
Manual mode allows for manual setting of the primary overclock tweaks. Click the “More Settings” button for additional advanced tweaks.
Easy Mode hides all settings excepting the BCLK freq. (formerly known as FSB freq) I see Easy Mode for fine tweaking, since it lacks the ability to adjust the CPU voltage. There are some preset profiles, but the highest preset is a BCLK of 140.
Auto Tuning mode not only overclocks, it makes all necessary adjustments and tests for stability. The rig will probably reboot two or three times during Auto Tuning. An animation shows during Auto Tuning showing the relevant overclock settings while tuning.
Turbo Key allows for the setting of hot keys to give “one touch” overclocking on the fly. After you have set overclock profiles in TurboV, you program your own personal hot key combination.
Overclocking:
To be honest, I’ve never cared much for software overclocking, at best they usually give only mild overclocks that leave much to be desired, and at worst the software itself made the entire system unstable. But it is kind of pointless to talk about the feature without actually using it, so I used TurboV’s Auto Tuning to overclock the system. I used the Extreme Tuning mode just to see what kind of “Extreme” overclock that TurboV would give.
After launching the utility, the system immediately rebooted, and my first thought was “Man, not another one!” But TurboV launched after the system restarted, and began doing its thing. I was pretty surprised as it started its run at about 4.1gHz. I hadn’t even manually clocked the processor that high yet. The fan ramped up so I glanced back at the screen and Auto Tune was running the CPU through a stability test.
After about a total of 5 minutes of tuning, the system rebooted again. This time I got the “Windows did not shut down properly” message, so I assumed that the utility shuts Windows down when instability is reached rather than bluescreening or locking up. When the utility started back, it gave me the option whether to continue for a higher clock or stop tuning. Of course I chose the former. After a few more minutes it rebooted again, gave the “shut down” message again, and when the rebooting finished TurboV notified me of my new overclock via a window.
I was very pleased as TurboV awarded me with a new clock of 4.2gHz, a very impressive 44% overclock. I really didn’t think I could do much better manually so I left it there.
