BIOS Features
For a low priced motherboard, the ECS 650iSLIT-A motherboard offers a surprisingly robust BIOS with lots of overclocking features.
The CPU multiplier adjustments are made here and by moving it down, you can enable some higher FSB overclocking with just about any CPU.
The PCI Express bus can be clocked as well though only up to the 131 MHz mark we see here; compared to 680i motherboards that overclock to 150 MHz, this is detriment in overclocking seems minor.
Moving into the meat of the NVIDIA designed overclocking BIOS, the ECS motherboard continues to include the Auto/Linked/Expert options when it comes to the front-side bus and memory bus.
When set to linked, the FSB directly relates to the memory bus with a ratio that can be adjusted above. A 1:1 ratio would tell the system to run the memory at the same speed as the FSB, so 1066 FSB to 1066 MHz memory speeds.
The front-side bus can be adjusted from 400 MHz up to 2500 MHz which should be more than high enough for just about any overclockers.
When in expert mode as it is called, you can adjust the memory frequency completely independent of the FSB — a feature the 680i first introduced. Here you can move the memory up to 1400 MHz, well beyond the DDR2-800 that the 650i is speced at.
The memory timing adjustments are also pretty in-depth and separate the more commonly adjusted settings from the advanced for easy viewing.
The voltage adjustments are a bit more modest than we have seen on the 680i series of motherboards but should still offer enough overclocking room for most users. Here you can see the CPU voltages can be increased from 1.30v (default for our E6700 test chip) to 1.60v.
You can FSB voltages can be upped as well to 1.4v if you are trying to get higher overclocks from the FSB.
Memory voltages can be modified up to 1.95v — this is somewhat disappointing in that some modules recommend 2.1v for optimal overclocking performance.
The chipset northbridge can be run at higher voltages as well; 1.50v is the maximum for the SPP.
The PC health status and monitoring pages enable you to view a couple of system voltages and temperatures as well as setting up the levels at which you’d like the motherboard to warn you with loud, annoying beeps of your CPUs impending doom.