BIOS and Overclocking

Soltek SL-86SPE-L uses AMI BIOS microcode. We should say that the BIOS Setup design is very similar to that of ASUS P4P800, which we have recently reviewed. It looks as if AMI found something very attractive for the mainboards manufacturers. Today their BIOS is used in a great number of mainboards for Pentium 4 platform.

Soltek has always paid attention to overclocking friendly options of its mainboards. Soltek SL-86SPE-L is no exception. The Setup is full of various functions for an overclocker to play with. All of them are available in Advanced BIOS Features on a page called Frequency/Voltage Control.

If you remember, Soltek offered automatic Red Storm Overclocking technology in its mainboards. When they started using AMI BIOS, this technology simply disappeared. All parameters involved into overclocking can be adjusted manually. Here is a list of these parameters:

• Adjustable bus frequency with 1MHz increment. The available range depends on the nominal CPU frequency or on the jumpers position (if they are not set to Auto). For CPUs with the nominal 133MHz FSB the maximum is 283MHz. if the nominal FSB frequency of the processor used is set to 200MHz, then BIOS Setup will allow setting the frequency up to 350MHz.
• Fix AGP/PCI Frequency option allows fixing these frequencies at the nominal 66MHz/33MHz during overclocking. Soltek SL-86SPE-L doesn’t allow overclocking the AGP and PCI buses separately.
• Manual processor Vcore adjustment between 1.1V and 1.85V with 0.025V increment. Although the maximum doesn’t strike you as really high, we believe that this is enough for most overclockers: you may hardly need higher CPU Vcore rates. Especially, since contemporary Pentium 4 processors with D1 core stepping overclock pretty well without any Vcore adjustment at all.
• Vdimm adjustment. You can set this parameter to 2.5V, 2.6V, 2.7V and 2.8V.
• Vagp adjustment. You can set this parameter to 1.5V, 1.6V, 1.7V or 1.8V.

As you can see, there is no way to adjust the memory frequency. The thing is that Soltek moved this setting to NorthBridge Configuration page of the Advanced Chipset Features in BIOS Setup. There you will also find all settings dealing with the memory timings.