BIOS Features
The BIOS on the Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus motherboard is just as robust and offers nearly all the same features that we saw on the Striker 680i motherboard.
All of the fun begins after setting this option to manual…
Starting with the PCI Express overclocking options, we have the ability to push the 100 MHz bus up to 2x that speed.
The HyperTransport bus between the north and south bridge chips can be adjusted as well from the default 200 MHz all the way up to 500 MHz!
In the FSB and memory section of the BIOS, we first decide if we want to run in a “linked” or “unlinked” mode. Linked sets a ratio between the FSB and the memory clock while unlinked allows the two buses to modified independent of each other.
If you chose to go with the linked mode, you can use ratios listed above, or go into “sync” mode that allows the chipset to decide as it goes.
Once you have all of that settled, you can start your overclocking. The FSB can be pushed up from the default 1066 MHz all the way up to 3000 MHz if the rest of the hardware would allow it.
The memory bus can be set to anything from 400 MHz to 2.6 GHz!
Multiplier adjustments are also available to you; only lower than default options will work on non-engineering sample CPUs though.
There a ton of memory timings to be adjusted in the BIOS and Asus does a good job differentiating between the major timings and the more advanced ones.
Here you can set the multiplier to the LDT bus between the north and south bridges.
If you want to fry your processor, Asus is going to help! 🙂 The Vcore options here provide the user with the ability to push 1.9v to the CPU.
For your memory modules, you can go well beyond the 2.8v default values of most memory to 3.425v.