As I have already promised, I have to say a few words about AGP Timing Control. Here we can enable/disable Fast Writes mode, change AGP Aperture Size, and AGP time settings, such as inserting an idle clock cycle before writing in and reading from the AGP for higher stability. The first thing mentioned should be responsible for manual changing of the AGP working mode, but as you can see from the screenshot, it is frozen at “Auto”. Well, this is one more strange peculiarity, which is definitely not mentioned in the user’s guide as well. In fact, we are not longer surprised with things like that...

The next undocumented surprise is waiting for us in the Power Management Setup section. Take a look at the CPU HALT Command Detection parameter. The name is far from evident, don’t you think so? The manual doesn’t have any description for this item. So, we can only guess what this item actually stands for. The most logical supposition in this case is that this is none other but the well-known S2K Bus Disconnect technology, which allows reducing significantly the AMD CPUs temperature in idle mode. However, our experiments didn’t show any temperature reduction when we enabled this option in the BIOS. So, this is either not the Bus Disconnect technology, or it doesn’t work, which is equally unpleasant for the end-user. By the way, the way this mainboard measures the CPU temperature is still a mystery for me: on the one hand, I didn’t find any thermal diodes on the PCB under the processor socket, but on the other hand 47^oC AMD Athlon XP 2700+ temperature seems to me a bit too low, especially when the CPU utilization is 100% and the regular boxed cooler is used. However, the anti-overheating circuit used on this board is very likely to be using the internal CPU diode for temperature measurements.

The next page is titled PC Health Status. I thought I should still mention it, although there is nothing unusual there. In fact, it is pretty hard to think of anything new there, the most important thing is that all voltages and temperatures are available. There is also Chassis Intrusion item, although I don’t really know how the board detects this intrusion.