X-bit labs

Meet Foxconn Mainboards: Foxconn 925A01-8EKRS2 and Foxconn 915A01-8EKRS2 Mainboards Review (page 5)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 12/14/2004 | 04:21 PM ]

BIOS and Overclocking

The BIOS of the 925A01-8EKRS2 and 915A01-8EKRS2 mainboards is based on Phoenix-AwardBIOS v6.00PG microcode, deeply revised by Foxconn’s engineers. Besides the standard options, the BIOS offers two additional features, not present in mainboards from other manufacturers.

The first feature is the SuperBoot technology: the mainboards can skip over the detection of the system components at the start of the computer but will instead use the information they have got earlier and have stored in their nonvolatile memory. This helps to achieve much faster boot-up times: the computer in fact goes right to booting up the operating system, skipping the identification of the CPU, memory, USB devices, HDDs and so on.

The second feature is the SuperRecovery utility integrated into the BIOS. It allows creating a partition on the hard disk drive which is hidden from your OS. You can use this partition to keep backup copies of the BIOS Setup settings, of the partition table or of some data stored on the HDD. Of course, this information can anytime be used to restore the originals.

Otherwise, the BIOS Setup of both mainboards has everything necessary to configure the system. There are options to control the parameters of the integrated devices, of the PCI Express bus and of the memory subsystem.

Well, we’re anyway more interested in the overclocking-related options which are found on the SuperSpeed page of the BIOS Setup. This page is identical on both mainboards; an overclocker will find the following options here:

• Selecting the memory frequency divider relative to the FSB frequency: Auto, 533MHz and 400MHz for 4:3 and 1:1 dividers, respectively. A non-automatic selection of the memory frequency divider only works when the memory timings are set up manually, rather than by SPD;
• The FSB clock rate can be adjusted from 200MHz (from the default FSB frequency of the installed processor) to 350MHz stepping 1MHz;
• The PCI Express frequency can be varied from 100 to 200MHz stepping 1MHz;
• The frequency of the PCI bus can be set up relative to the frequency of PCI Express or fixed at 33.3, 36.36 or 40MHz;
• The CPU voltage can be increased above the default value by 0.3875v at most, stepping 0.0125v;
• The memory voltage can be raised by 0.03, 0.06 or 0.1v above the default;
• The chipset voltage can also be raised by 0.03, 0.06 or 0.1v above the default.