BIOS Features
Asus’ BIOS have been getting much better over the years and they are now pretty much on par with anyone’s overclocking feature set with the exception of maybe the DFI boards of the LAN Party series. Let’s see what this A8N32-SLI board offers.
This option for AI Overclocking allows you to select Manual overclocking (probably what you should use) and the other Asus proprietary options that will auto overclock your system.
After setting it to manual, you can see that we have the option to change the CPU bus speed up to 400 MHz, the HyperTransport connection between the north and south bridge up to 300 MHz and the PCI Express frequency up to 200 MHz.
The PEG Link Mode option was an Asus development that overclocks your graphics card automatically but even NVIDIA recommends turning this to disabled in nearly all circumstances.
The overvoltage options add power to certain components to the default setting without actually changing the default setting. You can use these features and still enable AMD’s Cool n Quiet if you’d like, for example, as the over-voltages simply “float” on top of the default ones. Here the CPU Vcore can be increased by 0.2v.
The north bridge can be over-volted to 1.3v.
The south bridge can be pushed to 1.6v.
And the HyperTransport bus can be moved from 1.2v to 1.3v.
DDR memory voltage options go all the way up to 3.2v.
Multipliers are available here as well, since we are using a standard Athlon 64 processor we only have lower multiplier options.
Finally, you can hard set the CPU voltage up to 1.5625v and then you can push it up to 1.7625v if you pair this with the over-voltage option.
