BIOS and BIOS functions
This is my bootup screen. AOpen has created
Vivid BIOS to make your POST screen a little bit less boring. You can let it display a 256 colors image. Another nice small feature is the
JukeBox Player which turns your PC into a CD player without having to boot to your operation system. JukeBox works with skins which you can upload in Windows.
Dr. Voice II is a function which makes your life a little bit easier when you are installing a new computer. When your PC won't POST it will tell you were the problem is in English, German, Japanese or Chinese (configurable with jumpers). Dr. Voice II works trough your Buzzer or trough your speakers if they are plugged in to the onboard audio controller. It can detect problems with your CPU, memory, VGA, PCI cards, FDD, HDD or keyboard. It gives error messages like "Your memory may have a problem", "Your keyboard may have a problem",...
The first picture shows the Advanced Chipset Features, in this section you can tweak your memory timings. Also note the Performance Boost Engine, this is avaible in BIOS version 1.01, more info about it can be found
here. On the second picture we have the Integrated Peripherals section. In there you can configure your HDD setup, configure RAID, turn integrated video and audio on or off, and a few other things.
Here we have the Silentek Hardware Monitor section.
Silentek is a technology to decrease the noise of your PC by for example letting your CPU/system fans run at a slower speed. You can also monitor your voltages here but when I compare these values with the ones my multimeter give then I see that the ones that the motherboard give are about 0.2V lower (on the 12V line) than they actually are.
And this section allows you to overclock your system. Overclocking of the AGP and PCI bus is not possible when you are using a SATA device. The FSB of your CPU can be increased in 1MHz steps from 100MHz to 400MHz. The clock of the DDR Ram automatically goes up when you increase the FSB of your CPU so you might want to lower the divider if you only have DDR400 memory. You can choose between 1.33, 1.60 and 2.00. An implentation to protect his users against the dangers of overclocking is
WatchDog ABS which will automatically reboot and reset your system to its normal clock frecquency in 5 seconds when the overclock fails. From personal experience I can tell you that in some cases this doesn't work however, then you will have to open your case and shut down power to place the jumper cap of jumper JP24 on the 2 and 3th pin. After a few seconds it will have loaded the default settings from the second BIOS so you can boot up again. You can also boot up with the second BIOS by leaving the jumper cap on pin2-3. This way you can download a new BIOS for the first BIOS chip if anything goes wrong during the flashing of a new BIOS.
Voltages :
- CPU : goes from 1.10V to 1.875V in steps of 0.25V
- AGP : goes from 1.50V to 1.775V in steps of 0.25V
- DDR : goes from 2.50V to 2.875V in steps of 0.25V
Head over to next page for some overclocking and benchmarks.
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