Despite having a fair number of jumper switches
on the board most of these are set and forget and all the important
functions can be set through the BIOS. This is your fairly stock
Award BIOS that should be familiar to most of you. All the familiar
settings are there plus one for increasing the chipset voltage
which is purely designed to aid in overclocking.
Memory timings include all the required parameters
needed to gain that extra performance hike. FSB can be increased
to 250MHz using now standard 1MHz increments.
The frequency/voltage screen gives access to the
necessary multiplier, voltage and frequency adjustments.
DIMM voltages are available up to 2.95V. This
is probably the safe upper limit for DIMM voltage but some users
will no doubt hanker for more.
AGP voltage increases, which for us have been
of little use in real terms, range from 1.65V to 1.95V.
And chipset voltages range up to 2.95V also. We
haven't seen any real benefits from this option either in overclocking
terms but it hasn't been around long enough for me to test it
in any great depth.
While CPU voltage can be tweaked up to 2.0V but
you'd better be thinking about some serious cooling before you
start approaching that kind of an increase.
My main disappointment was that the maximum manually
selectable multiplier is a fairly mundane 10.5x. Although the
BIOS will happily auto-detect and set higher CPU multipliers
the 10.5x manual maximum makes it impossible to configure for
faster unsupported CPUs until a BIOS upgrade becomes available
to support them natively.
