BIOS Features

As you might expect with a budget board in a mATX form factor, the BIOS on the Asus M2A-VM does not contain a plethora of overclocking and tweaking options.  However, it does have a much more open BIOS than the MSI motherboard we looked at last month. 

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Right off the bat we can adjust a few overclocking settings such as the voltage going to the north and south bridge chips.

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Memory voltage can be increased to 2.1v.

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The CPU voltage can be increased by 0.1v — this is just a minor tweak setting for users needing that last little push of stability.

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The multiplier can be adjusted as well; up and down if you are running an FX processor and down if you using a standard Athlon X2 CPU. 

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The Vcore voltage can be increased up to 1.55v for overclocking the CPU.

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Overclocking the on-die processor bus speed is possible up to 400 MHz, twice the default 200 MHz.

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The Asus BIOS also allows you to enable or disable the AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet funcationality — leaving it on will allow the system to lower power consumption when full CPU speed is not necessary.

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You can set the default memory speed from DDR2-400 to DDR2-800 and a couple of settings in between depending on the memory modules you use in the system.

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You can manually adjust the HyperTransport bus between the processor and chipset here.

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All of the on-board features can be enabled or disabled here in the BIOS.

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Though the hardware monitoring is pretty basic, the information the Asus M2A-VM motherboard provides can be useful including the fan speeds, voltages and temperatures.

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A unique Asus feature in the BIOS is the ability to use your PC and a music CD as an alarm clock!

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Most Asus BIOS’ have had support for profiles and the fact that we are seeing it on the budget-based M2A-VM motherboard indicates that the feature is here for the long run.

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Another great feature of the BIOS I like is the ability to flash the BIOS from within the BIOS — no longer do you need a bootable floppy disc to safely update your motherboard.

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