BIOS
ASUS has been loyal partners for American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) BIOSes for as long as I care to remember. The majority of motherboards ship with some variant of Phoenix's excellent BIOS, so readjusting to the peculiarities of AMI's takes some getting used to.
Most of the important settings are contained under the Advanced tab. Here's what ASUS allows you to tinker with. Our sample's BIOS was flashed to v1015 before benchmarking and stress testing was carried out. Instant Music Configuration is an interesting submenu. It allows your PC to be turned into a music player without having to enter the operating system, although playback is limited to an optical drive. This kind of feature is often seen on laptops.
The initial adjustment screen within the JumperFree section uses ASUS' AI technology for simple overclocks, ranging from +5% to +30%. Please bear in mind that both the CPU and memory settings will be overclocked accordingly. We prefer the old-fashioned manual method, as shown above. CPU ratio is only available on unlocked or semi-unlocked CPUs. External frequency has a healthy range of between 100 - 400MHz. We'd prefer the ability to input a desired FSB rather than have to scroll through each one. Using a 200MHz FSB Pentium 4 DRAM frequencies can be set to either 400MHz (1:1), 320MHz (5:4), 266MHz (3:2), or automatic. Intel's i875P chipset, of which this is ASUS deluxe version, allows for bus locking, so AGP/PCI can be set to 66.66/33.33MHz (default), 72.73/36.36MHz, or 80/40MHz. We'd urge most users to stick with the default setting.
CPU voltage, using a Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition CPU, ranged from 1.60v - 1.95v. We'd also like to see a broader range of lower voltages. Something along the lines of 0.8v - 2v, perhaps. DDR voltage manipulation is pretty standard nowadays, and ASUS allows up to 2.85v. Again, with this being a deluxe board, 3v+ might not have been a bad idea.
A bizarre trait of the P4C800-E is the need to manually force Canterwood performance, that is, to enable ASUS' Performance Acceleration Model. This should be a given on the i875P chipset. Just like DDR speeds, latencies can either be manually defined, as above, or left to SPD timings. Another quirk of the sample board was to apply a tRAS setting of 1 clock less than what's inputted in BIOS.
Features are controlled in a separate subscreen. ASUS splits these extras and storage setup into two distinct groups. This is a deluxe board and we expect almost every conceivable extra to be included.
CPU voltage, in particular, was prone to high degrees of fluctuation in both the BIOS and when under load in an OS environment. The noted deviation from what's inputted is a little worrying, and it's far more than we've seen from other i865PE / 1875P boards recently, using the same PSU. Another discrepancy with other boards has to be the low reported CPU temperature. A 3.4GHz Extreme Edition, by very definition, is one hot-running CPU. ASUS' monitoring section reports that a reference heatsink is keeping it at 44.5c with no additional cooling. That's hard to believe, frankly. The lack of DDR voltage reporting is a confusing omission. We do like ASUS' Q-Fan, however, as it's a basic CPU fan speed regulator that can be set to fractions between 11/16 and 16/16.
On-chip SATA support from the ICH5R allows for independent and RAID running. More storage support is present in the form of Promise's hybrid PDC20378 controller. A decent enough BIOS that could be improved with just a little more thought.