BIOS Features (cont’d)
Starting into the voltage settings, the first selection is for the CPU VCore, selectable up to 1.9v.
Memory voltages can be increased manually up to 3.25v, much more than you should need to get the best OC results.
The HyperTransport bus can be overvolted to 1.95v.
The north bridge of the 680i can be increased to 2.75v…
…while the south bridge can be increased to 1.85v. You can see now why these NVIDIA chipsets are so power hungry!
The CPU termination voltages, that can help in FSB overclocking, can be increased to 1.55v.
Very minute memory voltage changes can be made here at the memory controller itself, adding or subtracting 10 to 30 mV.
Of course, with the 680i chipset, we get support for NVIDIA’s SLI memory feature, now supported by Corsair, OCZ and even Kingston.
The Asus Striker hardware monitoring section gives you voltage read outs on quite a few rails.
The temperature monitoring looks at the CPU and motherboard temps, as well as the optional temperature sensors that Asus includes in the box.
Quite a few fan speeds can be viewed as well.
And the fan speed controls follow the options that we have seen on the high end Asus motherboards for about a year now; quite a bit of flexibility and granularity is built in.
The Striker Extreme includes BIOS profile saving and loading; even more interestingly is the ability to save and load a profile from a disc. This allows users to share BIOS settings without having to write them all or take screen shots, just email a very small BIOS profile to your pals and try it out.
Another great feature of the BIOS is ability to flash the BIOS without the need for a boot disc. You can uses floppy, CD or even USB drive to load the new BIOS with the integrated flashing program.
