Remember the video "ASUS 4-Way Optimization"?

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
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... If you do and really liked the simplicity, even for those new to overclocking, then maybe just read a bit further.

First, to everyone from tek syndicate, I love the show, love the rant 30, everybody loves the NSA (also here in the UK, I guess... ha).

Now, my rant 30....

Asus ROG motherboard do NOT have the automatic CPU tuning feature as JJ explained (and successfully marketed) in your video - and in many, many other videos for that matter.

Warning, TLTR... Well, I was really intrigued by the nice n shiny Asus 4-Way Optimization. Especially for me, coming from an AMD FX-8350, Phenom II etc... My last Intel is a while ago (200 MMX lol). I recently bought a 4770K and an Asus ROG Maximus VI Formula. After I got that all set up, installed AI Suite III, hoping to get a quick idea of how good or bad my 4770K is.

BUT:

Instead of TPU / "Extreme Tuning" on e.g. the Asus Z87 Pro, on a ROG motherboard, you will only find "CPU Level", giving you 4.2, 4.4, 4.6 to select. There is no benchmarking, no fine-tuning, nothing. The "CPU Level" just changes the multi in the UEFI, and that is pretty much it. I can manually overclock my 4770K to 4.6GHz, however Asus' ROG "CPU Level" lala feature managed to set settings that let me not even boot into Windows.

Worst part is, Asus says the following about the Asus ROG Maximus VI Formula on their website:

"Starting with the Turbo Processing Unit (TPU), 4-Way Optimization performs Auto Tuning, which automatically overclocks the CPU to within ~95% of its potential, a process that typically could take up to 2 days to manually overclock. Auto Tuning is even able to overclock 2 cores at a time, and can configured to prioritize either multiplier (default) or BLCK if desired."

I have not seen anything even close to "2 days" worth of tweaking by the software, judging on what has been changed in UEFI automatically, literally, it is more like "2 minutes". It takes me actual two minutes though to manually change my 4770K to boot though at 4.6Ghz (which AI Suite III won't manage) - just changing CPU Multi, CPU volts, CPU Input 1.9v - done.

In the Asus forum I just been told "sorry, your board doesn't have this feature". ???

Conclusion: Asus marketing is top - they get it sold. Awesome.

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We were running the 4 way optimization on a couple of their ROG boards. This was done with 'magical Cherry CPU' brought by JJ and some 'random' parts we bought at retail that were not cherry picked at all (we happened to get a stable 4.8!). Our enginerring sample Haswell was so crappy, it cratered and took a motherboard with it.

The Formula was not out or available to us. We did run into some issues with Ai Suite III and the 4 way optimizer BUT Asus offered patches on their private FTP. Ai Suite III from after 8-22 that is supposed to clear up the 4 way optimizer stuff BUT it does appear that 4 way optimization works differently between ROG and Channel. This is sort of a developing thing and was not made clear to us at the time.
Plus it also worked fine on the Hero, which is what we did the most testing on because its pretty mainstream.
 
Have a look here: http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?36169-Maximus-VI-Formula-4-Way-Optimization-Error/page8


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This is very interesting to us -- two things I would add. When we were testing, we found a couple of mistakes on the Asus.com website and we emailed JJ and he emailed the web team to get them fixed. We tested the auto tuning thing pretty well and when we ran into some issues JJ did say that it 'worked differently' on some parts. The asus thread (still developing) over here, where Raja is commenting:

http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?36169-Maximus-VI-Formula-4-Way-Optimization-Error/page8

It looks like some parts have 'presets' or something? but the screenshots on the actual M VI Formula page shows 'four way optimization' in the actual screenshot. Can you make sure your UEFI is up to date and your AI Suite III is dated 8-22 or newer?

Watch this space for further developments ;)

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I think the whole idea of a TPU is great for laptops and other smaller devices but is a horrible idea for towers where many users like to overclock. It just seems to interfere too much.

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Hey, and WOW, first post here and I do get two of the main guys to comment :))) Thanks Logan and wendell, and as wendell says, this is indeed very interesting! Be assured, everything is up to date with my board / UEFI / correct AI Suite / latest version! :)

  • The ROG boards do have presets, called "CPU Level" (4.2, 4.4, 4.6).
  • Selected other Asus boards (channel series) with Asus' 4-Way Optimization do have the dynamic overclocking feature, i.e. the selection for "Ratio Only" and "BCLK First" as well was "Fast Tuning" and the sought-after "Extreme Tuning" options.

Raja@ASUS posts the following on http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?36169-Maximus-VI-Formula-4-Way-Optimization-Error/page9 : "It will always be presets. The hardware required for the dynamic OC is not on the board so it cannot do the dynamic OC part. That feature is on some of the channel motherboards only. Just to clarify." (He is talking about ROG boards).

Having just bought the Asus Maximus VI Formula, and coming from AMD, I kind of liked that feature. JJ's been around in many videos, showing off the dynamic overlocking, never mentioning that ROG board do not have it. And since it was also advertised on the respective Asus motherboard website for my board, why have a doubt... http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/MAXIMUS_VI_FORMULA/, 

"Starting with the Turbo Processing Unit (TPU), 4-Way Optimization performs Auto Tuning, which automatically overclocks the CPU to within ~95% of its potential, a process that typically could take up to 2 days to manually overclock. Auto Tuning is even able to overclock 2 cores at a time, and can configured to prioritize either multiplier (default) or BLCK if desired. " - This is just not true - it is only "CPU Level".

At the end of the day, no one would care if it did the same job, but it doesn't. I am running my 4770K at 4.7GHz now (2400MHz RAM), my AI Suite III did not manage to Windows boot with "CPU Level - 4.6" settings. And that is not surprising, since the 4-Way Optimization for ROG boards takes literally only a second to "work out" the TPU, takes way more time to set the EPU, Fans and DigiVRM+...

I just thought this is important for those who consider an Asus ROG board, hoping the board / software to help them overclock. I can manage myself, manual is most likely better than software anyway - but for those who do not want to spend that much time, ROG boards may disappoint.

The NSA probably knew it.

@Logan - I been testing four different 4770K (3 different batches, L312B, L314B, 2xL315B) today. They are all not the golden 4.8GHz+ CPUs. But one thing is sure: The ROG version of 4-Way Optimization will "work fine" if you have a CPU that is capable of 4.6GHz at 1.275v / 1.3v. So, if you had those kind of CPUs nobody would notice, that the ROG version of the software does nothing else, but set the multiplier to 46 and changes voltage. And that is not exactly difficult, even possible for the Apple users :)

@Namix - not even remotely arguing with that. But then they shouldn't advertise it as if. Might have as well bought a Gigabyte or MSI board.

</rant>

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I wanted to write a whole bunch here from my personal experience with Asus mobos in the last couple of years to the last couple of weeks, but I won't, let's just say that I don't recommend Asus Haswell Z87-mobos to anyone. Do yourselves a favour, if you want to go with Asus, get a cheap nice H/B87 mobo and a cheaper non-k CPU, you'll have up to 30% better framerate in games, you'll have KVM and IOMMU (if there was one single feature that their premium prices boards needed, that was it), you'll have a stable and functional BIOS that a normal person can even understand how it works, and a fair chance that it might work with linux, and your useless DigiVRM (yes useless, because the on-board VRM of the Haswell CPUs prevents droops and the CPU downclocks like a maniac anyway, even if you have a cherry picked good one, and those are as rare as mead distilled by mountain gnomes from unicorn rainbow pee) won't be as overengineered that the USB power stack is so underengineered that your computer crashes when you plug your phone into a USB port for charging.

Oh and don't count on a BIOS update, Asus doesn't give a fuck, and don't try to call them or contact them, they'll ignore you like a boss, because they are the untouchable majesty with the golden expensive blingboards... y'know what, the gold theme on their boards says it all: the more bling, the less substance...

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I can't tell if you're trolling or just...

anyway go ahead and get gigabyte, I just know you'll love their reliability and overclockability

did you even watch the video and DIRECTLY FOLLOW STEP BY STEP INTRUCTIONS


or did you just say fuck it and try figure it out by yourself because you MUST be a troubleshooting master using the auto overclock in all

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@ Zoltan - "those are as rare as mead distilled by mountain gnomes from unicorn rainbow pee" - Amen - that's why people should buy AMD, just to keep a competitor in the market. It looks like many review are feed by cherry picked Intel platinum grade CPUs. I have seen and heard of quite a few 4770K now and hardly ever do you get a stock VID <1v... 4770K, smaller cpu, less cost (materials), no soldering, wide range. :/ Still, it is already pretty good at stock.

Also, I had issues with the USB ports on my previous Crosshair V Formula-Z... meh.

@gigabusterEXE - ? - as of 02:52min you see the stuff I described, sorry much info, I know - I am saying that ROG boards do not have that functionality. That's it. 


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I don't know mate, I've pretty much always used both AMD and Intel for various reasons, I just use the right tool for the job, but AMD is very close to Intel on linux, whereas it's not as close to Intel on legacy closed source software consoles like MS-Windows.

Normally, I don't care about the consumer platform, my intel systems are mostly platform 2011, but I kinda wanted a few Haswell workstations because Haswell CPUs have VMCS shadowing, which is very nice for virtualization and kind of a big deal, in fact, it's probably the only real worthwhile new feature of Haswell, and Haswell is not available on 2011 and will never be, because Haswell is like Pentium D, it's an enhanced pipelines chip that falls in between architectures. So I ordered parts to make 3 such systems (for new interns here, non-advanced linux qualified personnel only works in virtual xen appliances, because it's frequently snapshotable, and if they screw something up, it's a 10 second fix so they work relaxed, and of course, only those that really know what they're doing have perms to do anything on the host systems, if there's something wrong with those (which has never been the case), RedHat comes to solve it immediately, and they ssh in first, and of course, they have no business looking at the company's files, so virtualization is really the only solution), and I ordered the new 1150 Z87 WS boards from Asus first because they were available first, but instead of using the extra Haswell virtualization features, Asus blocks them by using a very low grade PCIe controller that has less throughput and only links the PCIe bus to the Z87, not to the CPU, and that's exactly the whole idea of the PCIe bus and hardware virtualization, so that's a pretty unforgiveable engineering error. They probably mounted the stupid PCIe controller to be able to put PCIe 3.0 on the box, since when you link the bus to the Z87, it's PCIe 3.0 spec, but that means nothing, because it's 15-30% slower than the direct PCIe lane to the CPU under spec 2.0 with a traditional PCIe controller. So Asus can't make their engineering error right with any BIOS update, because it's simply a hardware problem., just like the hardware engineering error that prevents the Asus Maximus VI board to use 4-way optimization. Fact is, with this generation of boards, Asus has really outdone themselves in poor and faulty hardware design, and they try to make up for it with faux gold lacquer and flashy gaming themed boxes.

And I won't even start on the choatic mess that Asus UEFI is, there is just no sense at all to the interface, everything is unclear and all over the place, a serious regression in usability in comparison to a traditional BIOS.

So I ordered 3 Gigabyte Z87 boards (non-WS boards, cheaper, with standard BIOS) for the Haswell 4770 chips that I had bought, and everything worked, the PCIe 2.0 controller provided lanes directly to the CPU, circumventing the slow and non-IOMMU PCIe 3.0 spec of the Z87, the USB headers have a huge amount of power, the BIOS can be updated even without a running system just with a USB stick, there are no BIOS glitches, everything is hunky dory, for 140 bucks a pop less than the unusable Asus blingboards.

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I gotta admit, that is even for my standard quite extensive ;) but yes, I definitely get your point. As in, yes, I can see it's nice n shiny, but there is defo some doubt about marketing vs actuals.

For my purposes, I be able to live with the board, can't return it b/c I already used it. As long as Excel works I am pretty much happy. At work I luckily don't have to worry too much about my Xeons :)

Ah well, it's kinda pointless. I think no one wants to piss off Asus too much, as you may have seen what happened to TTL oO (who knows), and b/c a lot of people wanna see their products = JJ time. I couldn't care less if I'd know about my motherboard beforehand, but I didn't. I'd probably have gotten a gigabyte board. Or MSI - my old K9N2 Sli Platinum off ebay for 50quid from a long time ago did last me until my Phenom II @4.0GHz... Next time I'll remember.