BIOS
We've not seen too many DFI boards here at Hexus, and one doesn't really hear much about them from the enthusiast community. We've been suitably impressed by the bundle, features and overall layout thus far. It's time to see if the BIOS can continue the favourable impression.
Classic Award here, save the Genie BIOS for the overclocking settings. These BIOSes are much like bicycles, that is, if you've used them once you're not likely to forget how to navigate through them quickly and easily.
The Gene BIOS section will be of most interest to our readers. Interestingly, with a 200FSB CPU in the socket we were unable to choose a FSB of lower than the nominal 200MHz. The FSB is stepless from 200 - 400. It's also nice that we can manually key in our desired FSB. Voltages are a section that we place particular emphasis upon. DFI do the right thing by allowing up to +0.350v (350mV is how DFI express it). We also like the fact that live CPU voltage readings are shown in the over-voltage section. CPU voltage is good but DIMM and VAGP leave a little to be desired. 2.7v DIMM really isn't enough for low latency timings once we're overclocking. 2.8v+ is what we like to see. It's a little strange to see the CSA LAN and Highpoint RAID controls here.
The other 'tweaking' screen that we like to delve in is the Advanced Chipset Features. We use the Hexus standard 2-6-2-2 timings at DDR400 speeds, all helped by some excellent Corsair modules. The memory frequency can be set to either synchronous (DDR400 @ 200FSB) or asynchronous with 5:4 and 6:4 CPU FSB-DDR ratios. You'll need the latter ratios once you see just how far this board can go. Incidentally, selecting a 'Fast' Dram R/W Timing pushed up memory bandwidth performance by just over 1% when compared to the BIOS' standard 'Auto' timing. Fast was used for benchmarking.
The hardware monitoring section allows one to pre-define the shutdown temperature and CPU protection alarm. The board boasts that it will shut itself down within a few seconds if a 0 RPM CPU fan speed is observed and CPU fan protection is enabled. That certainly seemed to be the case when the fan was unplugged from the header. The initial shipping BIOS seemed to over-inflate the CPU's temperature. A quick BIOS flash to the 06/05 version cured this small problem. Voltages were generally good. We'd have hoped to see both DDR and VAGP voltages in this section, though.
The remaining BIOS is just what you would expect. There's ample toggling of features, and the ICH5/R's mix of S-ATA and P-ATA is easily configurable. A little more voltage for DDR and a better hardware monitoring screen would have taken this BIOS above many others. As it is, it's merely a notch above average.