BIOS and Overclocking

It is interesting to check out mainboard BIOS when configuring certain settings may help change some important system parameters, for example, increase system performance. We haven’t paid too much attention to BIOS settings of “small” mainboards before, because there was actually not that much to see anyway. However, things are completely different with Zotac ION-ITX-C. This mainboard not only offers a wide range of system parameters, but even allows overclocking the integrated Atom processor.

The BIOS of Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard is based on AMI microcode and its internal structure is typical for full-size mainboards. Several screenshots below will give you a general idea of the structure and informational contents of Zotac ION-ITX-C BIOS Setup:

The settings variety is obviously determined by the fact that Zotac ION-ITX-C is based on Nvidia GeForce 9300 chipset. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is an MCP79 Configuration page in the Chipset section where all enthusiast-related settings are.

As you can see from the screenshot, the mainboard allows increasing the DDR2 SDRAM and chipset voltages. However, the supported voltage ranges are not too impressive: the memory voltage may be increased from the default 1.8 V to 2.1 V, and the chipset voltage – from the default 1.0 V to 1.1 B. Unfortunately, Zotac ION-ITX-C has no options for processor core voltage adjustment, which imposes serious limitations on its overclocking potential.

Nevertheless, there are FSB and memory frequency settings in the BIOS, they are singled out on a separate page called Performance Options. The major timings settings are also here.

However, you shouldn’t hope to squeeze a lot out of the Atom 230 processor working at 1.6 GHz nominal frequency. The maximum overclocking result that we achieved during our practical experiments was 1.98 GHz.

The 20% increase in the processor frequency won’t provide a significant performance improvement. And it means that we can’t really hope to speed our single-core Aton 230 processor up to the level of at least junior LGA775 models.

Even installing an additional fan onto the cooling heatsink doesn’t improve overclocking results. It does lower the CPU temperature quite noticeable, but its overclocking potential hardly gets any higher and even 2 GHz frequency remains unattainable for us. In other words, although the BIOS of Zotac ION-ITX-C mainboard offers quite a few enthusiast-friendly options, it shouldn’t be considered an option for overclocking needs.