The last page we are interested in is Genie BIOS Setting. This is the most important section of the entire BIOS. Guided by some unknown logics, DFI included here the settings for frequencies and voltages as well as the settings dealing with enabling/disabling various integrated controllers (except the integrated audio codec that somehow crept into the traditional “Integrated Peripherals” section). Maybe the company wanted to stock up more settings in one place for you to navigate less along the BIOS pages. But why didn’t they include the settings for integrated sound then? I have no idea...

Anyway, it’s more important how flexible the settings are. So, the Vcore can vary from 1.1V to 1.85V with 0.025V step and from 1.85V to 2.0V with 0.05V step. The DIMM slots are powered with 2.5V-2.8V voltage with 0.1V increment. Vagp changes from 1.5V to 1.8V with 0.1V increment. The chipset voltage varies from 1.5V to 1.9V. These ranges are a treat for an overclocker, although the memory voltage range might have been wider. The fastest modules may require 2.9V. The chipset voltage range is impressive, really.

Now let’s pass over to the frequencies settings. The FSB frequency can be set from 100MHz to 300MHz with 1MHz increment. Possible AGP frequencies are 50MHz or 60-100MHz with 1MHz or 2MHz increment. As for the number of possible FSB/memory frequency ratios, DFI mainboard offers wide opportunities here just like any other nForce2-based product. I was very pleased to see that the memory frequency was shown right there. You don’t have to take guesses or make calculations to know which frequency the memory will work at on the next startup. By the way, you cannot type in the frequency value directly, but choose it from a scroll-down list.

Now, we will do a brief overclocking test. First of all, let’s see how close the mainboard is to the claimed upper limit of the FSB frequency (300MHz). It’s no secret that mainboard makers are prone to specify fantastic bus speeds, which are of no use, however. So, we reduce the CPU multiplier to 7x and reduce the memory frequency as greatly as possible, at the same time raising the memory timings. The chipset voltage will be set to 1.9V. After that we started steadily increasing the FSB frequency, to see when the mainboard would give in. we tested the mainboard stability with 3DMark2001 SE (run three times in a row), all demos from Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo and a full set of tests from the OpenGL SPECviewperf 7.1 benchmark.

Of course, the mainboard didn’t reach the desired 300MHz, although the achieved result was very nice: 241MHz. We also learned that 1.8V on the chipset didn’t affect the system stability. So, we guess that 1.9V voltage is redundant for the nForce2 chipset.

The second overclocking test aimed at checking the memory overclocking potential. We checked how high the mainboard allows overclocking OCZ PC3700 EL DDR memory with 3-4-4-8 timings in the dual-channel sync mode. We ran the same set of benchmarks.

Again, we achieved 241MHz as during asynchronous work. It looks like the overclocking potential of this mainboard is limited by the chipset itself, or by the FSB layout of the PCB rather than by the memory subsystem.