BIOS Features
Even though the Intel 855 chipset was never meant to be aimed towards the desktop market, let alone the enthusiast segment of it, it would come as no surprise that the BIOS didn’t offer much in terms of tweaking and overclocking. However, being as DFI always attempts to add a bit of pizzaz to their retail boards, you’ll find a bit more in their Phoenix BIOS rendition.
These are the memory tweaking options included on the motherboard; the four major memory timings are included.
The health status window gives us a good summary of all the fan speeds and voltages running across the motherboard. Here you might find a problem with your PSU or heatsink.
In the Frequency/Voltage control window we find the majority of the overclocking options for the Pentium M processor.
The default FSB on our processor is 100 MHz, but the DFI board allows you to attempt to overclock up to 250 MHz if you desire. In our testing, using down clocked multipliers, we were able to get to 141 MHz FSB stable.
Here you have the option of setting the PCI/AGP bus locks or setting a ratio instead.
The memory ratio adjusts to allow you to support up to DDR333 memory speeds. Of course, if you overclock the FSB over 100 MHz, the memory speeds increase with these as well.
And here is where a lot of overclockers are going to get the most benefit. Thanks to SpeedStep requiring the CPU multipliers to be unlocked (going down at least) you too can adjust them to allow you to overclock more efficiently.
At first glance, CPU voltage adjustments might seem great, but in fact, the highest they’ll go is the default voltage of my Intel 755 processor.
By far the coolest feature we have seen to date — DFI has started including MemTest86+ and CPUTest86+ in their BIOS! This means you can overclock in the BIOS, enable this option, and when rebooting, the system will automatically start running MemTest or CPUTest which you can use to gauge the stability of your overclocked system. I hope we see this in all DFI motherboards, and hopefully other vendors will pick up on the idea as well.
Here are the two applications running; MemTest up top and CPUTest right here.