BIOS

The BIOS is quite standard. It’s PHOENIX-AWARD, however, the interface is a little different, though you quickly get used to it. Almost all items are standard, I just want to dwell on only one: Advanced -> Advanced Chipset Features. There are no voltage settings at al, so you will be unable to adjust any voltages. Add the fact that the CPU multiplier is unchangeable, and you will get one more piece of evidence that Albatron KM18G Pro is not targeted for overclockers.

At the same time, the Advanced Chipset Features section has a great deal of settings. At the top you can see the System Performance item which can be switched between Optimal, Aggressive, Turbo and Expert. Each of them fixes the system parameters at certain values, and the last one allows manual adjustment of all parameters. Actually, when we tried to switch System Performance parameter from Optimal to Aggressive, we discovered one interesting peculiarity, which is probably just a small programming error of the BIOS developers. In Optimal mode we can change the DDR:CPU Ratio, and can’t do it in the Aggressive and Turbo modes. I obviously selected Expert mode to be able to play with all available settings.

So, the first item is FSB Frequency. It ranges from 100 to 200MHz with 1-2MHz increments. I wish it could be possible to type in figures manually instead of looking through the list. By the way, this parameter can be altered in all System Performance modes. So, even though Albatron KM18G Pro is not an overclocker’s solution, this way Albatron made a certain curtsy for overclockers.

The CPU Interface item contains two options: Optimal and Aggressive. They change FSB timings, and the variants names speak for themselves. Then comes DDR:CPU Ratio, which I have already mentioned above. There are a lot of values here, as nForce2 is very flexible in this respect. Note that the memory subsystem of nForce2 reaches its maximum performance relative to the CPU when the FSB and memory work synchronously, i.e. when this parameter is set to 1.

A bit lower you can see the Memory Timings line with the identical presets as those of the System Performance. When you change one of the System Performance parameters a corresponding item in the Memory Timings menu will change respectively. The Expert mode in the Memory Timings is the only exception: you should enable it manually. The range of settings is pretty wide thanks to the nForce2 capabilities.

All other parameters are standard except, maybe, Frame Buffer Size, which determines how much memory of the system memory should be allocated for the frame buffer of the integrated graphics core. It’s seen only if an external graphics card is not installed.

Now, when we are finally through with the description of the board and chipset, let’s start our tests.