X-bit labs

ASUS Striker Extreme Mainboard Review (page 6)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 02/06/2007 | 09:31 PM ]

BIOS

When ASUS launched their Striker Extreme mainboard they specifically stressed that it was designed to satisfy any overclocking needs. Therefore, the BIOS Setup of this board features a great number of overclocking-friendly options. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Everything that has to do with tweaking and overclocking has been moved to a separate BIOS Setup section called Extreme Tweaker:

LinkBoost and SLI-Ready Memory technologies that can be enabled here are hardly of any interest to advanced users, however, Striker Extreme supports them entirely. Also you can activate AI Overclock (overclocking by a certain value in %) and AI N.O.S. (Non-delay Overclocking System – dynamic overclocking tool). However, these two technologies are also not the hardcore overclockers’ primary tools.

The most interesting part hides in the next subsections. If you get to the System Clocks page you will be able to set the frequencies for the PCI Express bus and the HyperTransport bus between the chipset bridges.

In the FSB & Memory Config section you can adjust the FSB and memory bus frequency.

Note that the front side bus frequency is set in a slightly unusual “quadruple”-format. If we recalculate that to common numbers, then FSB can be clocked between 133MHz and 750MHz. The memory frequency is set either in connection to the FSB frequency using the FSB:DRAM dividers (1:2, 5:8, 3:4 and 1:1), or pseudo-asynchronously. Keep in mind that Nvidia nForce 680i SLI doesn’t have a fully asynchronous clock generator for memory frequency. Once you select the desired frequency the BIOS Setup will find the best divider (the chipset has a lot of them) and record the actual memory frequency. In most cases the actual frequency is about 10-20MHz lower than the desired one.

Overclocking section offers management tools for clock frequency multiplier of the processor and the technologies it supports.