DFI Motherboard Memory Reporting Raises Suspicions
A bug, intentional or not, seems to have surfaced in the new BIOS for DFI motherboards
Overclockers Online has a recent forum thread about DFI motherboards incorrectly reporting memory speeds under certain conditions.
The thread author claims that a BIOS function will deliberately and incorrectly report inflated memory speeds when overclocking -- if the user has enabled a new option in the BIOS.
The option, called Odd Divisor Correct or ODC, will round the memory divider on the motherboard up to the nearest even number. In one example given by the thread author, the memory in the thread ran at 270MHz with the ODC disabled. When the ODC was enabled, the BIOS reports that the memory was running at 300MHz. However, careful bandwidth testing reveals that the memory was still running at 270MHz instead of the reported 300MHz.
We got in touch with Jacky Huang, General Manager for DFI USA, to comment on the issue. Huang claims "As far as I know, the original purpose for this option was to use the down-clocks dependant on the CPU ratio and FSB, so that you can get the in between ratios. This would make the board more tweakable." However, he also adds "The function is from Award and AMI base code, it is not our invention." Huang assured us he is working with the BIOS programmers on this.
ASUS and Abit also use similar Award base codes for motherboard BIOSes, but so far no claims of the ODC bug have surfaced on those motherboards yet either. The BIOS used by the forum thread author is still labeled as beta software.
OCZ employee Tony Leach has contacted us claiming that ODC is behaving properly, but no applications currently report the down-clock correctly. Leach claims "Now I know some will cheat, but this option was not written in by DFI to do this, it was added in to enhance the tweakablity of the boards."