Okay, so a couple of days ago I began trying to overclock the CPU-NB/HT of my X3 720, with the core clocks already @3.6Ghz and stable. I was having trouble getting anything above the default 2Ghz to stabilise using sensible voltages with the 1604 BIOS for my M3a32-MBP board so I updated to the latest 2104 BIOS. Everything went fine and when I got back into windows I discovered a number of minor issues had been fixed; the negative temperatures in AMD Overdrive and the lack of GPU voltage data etc etc. What's more, I managed to raise the CPU-NB freq. to 2.4Ghz with a reasonable voltage hike - temps are fine (<52 degrees/43 degrees "core") and it's been stable running P95 (on large FFT to stress the L3 cache associated with the CPU-NB freq. I was tweaking) for about 3 1/2 hours - long enough that I decided to try a quick run through the CPC benchmark, expecting the tweak to the IMC/L3 cache to improve my score a little... ...and for some reason I'm now seeing a serious drop in the multitasking section of the benchmark, while the other two scores remain unaffected. Scores displayed as GIMP/Video/Multitasking & Overall; Pre BIOS update, with 2.0GHz CPU-NB: 1146/1547/962 & 1218 overall (averaged 2nd & 3rd run) Post BIOS update, with 2.4GHz CPU-NB: 1126/1530/732 & 1129 overall (first run) The second run through has just finished, and gives 1141/1473/756 & 1123, though I was messing about with AMD: OD and CPU-Z during the video encoding portion of that run trying to find out if my RAM was running at some daft settings - it isn't, it's the same as it was before. So, I'm baffled. I could understand a performance drop across all the benchmarks from bad BIOS, but in one of three benchmarks while the others remain the same? James mentioned earlier that the multitasking score is heavily dependent on memory bandwidth, but my RAM is at the exact settings it was before. Someone want to explain what I'm missing here? :S ps. Conveniently the ruddy Asus EZ Flash utility won't allow me to downgrade BIOS. Grrr
An update, though I don't think anybody has read this thread as yet; I've tried overclocking my RAM (which was my next goal after the IMC) and managed to get 1066MHz w. 5-5-5-18 out of it, stable enough to run multiple CPC benchmarks. It's not made much of a difference to the Image Editing or Video Encoding scores, but the Multitasking score has risen a bit - to around 830. This is still at least 150 points behind the previous BIOS, despite the CPU-NB & now RAM overclock.
It won't let me do that. It simply informs me that the version I'm trying to write is older than the current version, then gives me no other options. Apparently this happens to quite a few people with EZ Flash. Also, the windows flash utility doesn't work under 7, so that's out. And don't have a floppy drive to make a boot disk to use a DOS-based utility, and I can't get any of the "make a flash drive bootable" utilities to work under 7 either. Looks like I'm stuck
Just on the off chance anyone is interested/has a similar issue in the future, I managed to revert to the 1604 BIOS using the HP flash drive boot tool and the engineering edition of AFUDOS. I'm happy to give in depth details of this process to anyone who needs to downgrade Asus AFI BIOS but can't. Apparently the problem exists on a whole load of motherboards; the solution I used wasn't specific for my board. Multitasking Score @3.6GHz with 2104 BIOS I got stuck with = 732 Multitasking Score @2.8GHz (only just flashed so no OC yet) with 1604 BIOS = 844 So the stock CPU beats the overclocked CPU by quite a big margin just because of the BIOS being better. Weird huh? Going to overclock again at some point, hoping to get back to where I was (multitasking over 1000, overall about 1250) with the same settings I had applied before. Annoyingly flashing the BIOS has deleted my saved profiles so I'll have to find my notebook out. EDIT: just to clarify, I've not been trying to fix this since my previous post, I just thought I'd take another look at it today and managed to sort it.
