Although some of the more
exotic features are absent the BIOS covers most of what you're
likely to want to access, with one or two exceptions :
BIOS Advanced Menu
BIOS Advanced Chipset Features Menu
BIOS DRAM Clock/Drive Menu
The memory timings (above) are not as comprehensive
as on many boards and I was bemused to find options like bank
interleave and burst length are missing.
BIOS AGP & P2P Bridge Control Menu
The AGP & P2P Bridge control Menu held the
biggest surprise for me. Where's the AGP mode option for setting
AGP1X / AGP2X / AGP4X or AGP8X? One setting I wasn't especially
familiar with was the DBI (Dynamic Bus Inversion) Output for
AGP Transactions setting. In all honesty I'm not entirely clear
what the hell this setting does other than what I already knew
(possibly wrongly) that it limits the number of transfers per
clock cycle to eight and that it's relevant only to the AGP
v3.0 standard with transmitter and receiver DBI function required
only for AGP8X. Let's say enabling it is a stability measure
and I'll wait to be corrected.
BIOS Frequency/Voltage Control Menu
The BIOS Frequency/Voltage Control menu offers
a fairly comprehensive set of overclocking features. Unlike
all the other KT400 boards I've seen thus far Albatron haven't
included the option to increase the chipset voltage, surprising
since they've gone to the trouble of including a fan on the
North Bridge.
BIOS Frequency/Voltage Control Menu
For a pleasant change the full range of multipliers
are accessible from 13x up to a massive 24x with a few gaps.
When I popped in our 2400+ however the available multipliers
changed to 13x, 14x and 15x all of which I was able to use without
having to manually unlock the CPU. To get the lower multipliers
I had to connect up the last L3 bridge which opened up the multipliers
from 12x and down, but at the expense of the higher ones which
of course vanished.
BIOS Frequency/Voltage Control Menu
Slightly confusing to some possibly is the fact
that there's a setting for both CPU FSB clock select (below)
which lets you specify a FSB of 100, 133 or 166MHz and also
a CPU HOST Frequency setting which does the same thing but in
1MHz steps and overrides the CPU FSB setting when used. FSB
frequencies are available up to 233MHz.
BIOS Frequency/Voltage Control Menu
DDR speed is set with the use of a multiplier.
Options range from 2x to 3x FSB frequency. These values can
vary depending on the FSB speed in use.
