BIOS Features
Even though the board is branded as a “digital home” device, that doesn’t mean Asus has left out any of the goodies for overclockers and enthusiasts.
Jumping right into things, we can see here that the board supports 1 MHz increments on the CPU Frequency to 450 MHz (they recently released a newer BIOS for up 500 MHz support) and should provide plenty of head room for overclocking. Memory speed is supported here with some oddly labeled multipliers, courtesy of our 450 MHz FSB set in the step above. 🙂 The board supports the standard steps of multipliers including 400/667/800 MHz; as of now there is no 1066 MHz DDR2 memory support, but I think you can count on it being added if it hasn’t been already.
PCI Express speed can be modified up to 150 MHz…
And you can choose to lock the PCI bus or let it float along with the CPU front-side bus.
There are some good voltage options, including the memory voltage that is able to see a 2.4v input. The CPU voltages can be bumped up in 0.0125v increments as well, for some very precise settings.
FSB voltages are modifiable up to 1.5v…
…north bridge voltage up to 1.65v…
…and south bridge voltages up to 1.20v.
Since our processor is an engineering sample, we have access to both upward and downward ratio settings, up to 28x according to our BIOS here though we couldn’t get it to boot at those speeds. Interestingly, you can see here that HyperThreading is listed as a feature, though I am sure this is just a BIOS mistake and HT no longer exists on the Core 2 series of processors.
Memory timing settings are mainly limited to the majors, but this should be more than enough for most users. The settings above are the lowest options available in our tested BIOS revision.
All of the on-board peripherals can be turned on or off in the BIOS with ease.
The hardware monitoring feature in the BIOS keeps an eye on your voltages, temperatures and fan speeds and also allows you to enable fan speeds at certain temperatures.
Asus has an unique (and possibly annoying) feature that allows you to set an alarm in your BIOS that plays a certain track on a CD in the drive.
