BIOS Features
In addition to making the adaptor, Asus also needed to make some slightly modified BIOS files for the motherboards that support the Pentium M processor via the CT-479. As this processor uses a different FSB, different multipliers and very different voltage and power regulations, getting this done is the main reason why so few boards are currently supporting the adaptor.
Here you can see that the new BIOS correctly identifies the processor as a 2.0 GHz Pentium M processor.
In our frequency voltage menu, you can get a quick glimpse of all the options that Asus has allowed us to use for overclocking and tweaking the system.
First up, processor FSB; while the default FSB for my CPU is 100 MHz, you can see in the shot above that we are able to push the FSB all the way up to 400 MHz! This is well outside the limit of the Pentium M processor, but its nice to know the options are there beyond what current overclocking has in store.
Our DRAM frequency setting isn’t very helpful, only showing us options of 266 MHz (133 MHz DDR) or Auto. In this case, Auto also set the memory speed to 133/266 MHz meaning we were running the memory bus asynchronously with the front-side bus.
Here Asus is offering us some information on the PCI/AGP bus ratios that are in place on the motherboard. The Auto setting always chooses 66/33 MHz settings, as we did for our testing.
Here we have Vcore settings all the way up to 1.6v! That is much higher than the DFI 855GME or AOpen EY855-II motherboards allowed, and should give us some good room for overclocking down the road a bit.
Here we can set the DDR voltage from 2.55v to 2.85v to improve our memory overclocking if necessary.
AGP voltage can be increased as well up to 1.8v.
The Asus AI Overclock options apparently also work in the Pentium M processor, though we didn’t use them in favor of sticking with traditional overclocking methods.
Here’s a complete list of the memory timings and settings available in the BIOS for tweaking on the 865 memory controller.
Finally, the hardware monitor in the BIOS shows us voltages and temperature for the system.