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Asus A7N8X
Deluxe Modification Guide
Intro
When I first received my Asus A7N8X I liked it,
but I saw lots of room for improvement. Well, over a few months,
Asus has released a bunch of new BIOS revisions and many tweaks and
modifications have been found for this board. And now, I decided
to release it to everyone! With this guide, you will be able to
get the most performance out of your A7N8X Deluxe, and hopefully you'll
be able to reach some sick front side bus speeds!
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Some
Background on the A7N8X and the Voltage Mods
The A7N8X Deluxe originally came with a
maximum of 211mhz fsb in the bios, going from 100-200, then 204,
207, 211mhz. The highest I could achieve with 100% stability
was 204mhz. At 207mhz sound would give out, and @ 211mhz there
was hard drive corruption, followed by a ruined operating system
installation. A solution had to be found! The major
problem was that the chipset needed more voltage, which I will refer
to from now on as VDD voltage. The stock VDD is 1.6v and when
this voltage is raised to 1.9v or 2.0v your front side bus issue is
basically eliminated! Then the factor of "how high can I get
my front side bus" is solely on your memory! I must warn you
though that when you do the chipset mod, you will need watercooling
on your NF2 northbridge chip. I use an 85w peltier and a
dangerden (old style) chipset waterblock on my system. |
Now, that is not
the only thing that is holding the Asus A7N8X back. As we all
know, the Asus A7N8X only has 1.85v in the bios for the cpu and 2.8v for
the memory. Well, as I had stated in my review of the A7N8X, you
can voltage mod both of those and I will restate exactly what to do for
that in this guide. After you complete the vdd, memory, and cpu
voltage mods the A7N8X can really fly! But we're not done yet!
Bad BIOS, Bad!
The A7N8X has some bios issues what with not saving properly, acting
stupid, not doing what you tell it to do. Fixing this problem is
very easy! If you replace the battery on the motherboard with a
new battery (such as an Energizer) of the same value and model these
bios problems are no more! The problem, or so we overclockers
think, is that the standard battery only gives out 2.95v although it is
said to be 3v. If you put in an Energizer, you will get 3.3v!
This seems to fix the problems.
Another bios issue was that you can only hit 211mhz on the standard
bios! So thankfully, Asus was kind enough to release a bios
allowing up to 250mhz fsb. You can start to see things falling
into place now. 250mhz bios, VDD mod, mem mod, cpu mod, battery, a
new bios... what else? Well, I read on the AMDMB forums that if
you were to put the "CPU_FSB" jumper from "133/166mhz" setting to
"100mhz" you could hit higher frot side bus speeds. And geuss
what? It really helps! At one point, I thought my board was
dead. I was about to RMA it, and I then saw this and said, hey why
not. So I gave it a shot and BAM my system started oc'ing more
than ever!
So you're probably thinking, where can I get the newest bios?
Where can I see these voltage mods? How high can I expect my
system to overclock? Well, you can download the bios
here, and then
check out the next pages for all the other info!
Next Page - The Mods |
