BIOS
A peek at the BIOS reveals plenty of options.
The Advanced Chipset Settings page provides all the settings we have come to expect from enthusiast boards. A full selection of RAM timings makes sure you can squeeze every last bit of performance out of them.
CPU ratio is adjustable for those of you lucky enough to have one of Intel's Extreme Edition CPUs.
If you like to run your system at full speed all the time, then the SpeedStep option will be of interest. Other than that, everything else should be ideally left at default.
Monitoring on 5 fans should be enough for most. These can be monitored in Windows with the included ASUS PC Probe 2 software.
The AI Quiet feature is for a technology ASUS dubs “AI NOS”. Although the ASUS homepage says, and we quote: “Inject nitrous oxide into your CPU!” that would just be dangerous. What this feature actually does is monitor the load on the system and alter the CPU's frequency in accordance to demand. While this has been around for a while under different names, the AI NOS system claims to react much faster than competing auto-overclocking features.
If you're not a hardcore overclocker and don't like to set each parameter manually, AI overclocking will be a welcome feature. Set the target CPU frequency and ASUS will try to do the rest. This may not always be successful, and almost certainly won't get the best overclock, but if you don't have the time to spend tweaking the system, it could be for you.
Those happy to tinker with voltages and frequencies will be limited (or not) by the following:
Feature |
Adjustments possible |
|
FSB Clock |
100-450MHz (1MHz increments) |
|
CPU FID |
x6-CPU MAX. FID (1x increments) |
|
PCI-E Clock |
90-150MHz (1MHz increments) |
|
Memory |
533/667/800MHz |
|
CPU Core voltage |
0.6875V - 1.7V in 0.0125V increments |
|
Memory VDIMM |
Nominal (1.8V) – 2.4V in 0.05V increments |
|
FSB Termination Voltage |
1.2V – 1.5V in 0.1V increments |
|
Northbridge Voltage |
1.5 – 1.65 in 0.05V increments |
|
Southbridge Voltage |
1.05V or 1.2V |
|
FSB frequency is limited to 450MHz in the BIOS, which will probably be reached by ultra-serious overclockers using Core 2 Duo CPUs. Utilities such as Clockgen will allow it to be increased past this limit, but hopefully ASUS will raise the limit in a future BIOS update.