BIOS
Usually when reviewing a product, the reviewer receives some literature pertaining to the review item. With Shuttle keen to push this motherboard as a platform best suited for OEMs and system integrators, I was expected a pretty basic, locked BIOS. Overclocking is seriously frowned upon in any way, shape or form. Imagine my surprise when the motherboard's BIOS gave me the following screen options in the advanced chipset section
System performance can be set to either Optimal, Aggressive, Turbo, or Expert, with optimal being the least user configurable and expert giving one almost total control over the settings. Using the Expert settings, you can change FSB in 1MHz increments from 100 - 200MHz (although a few individual MHz options are conspicious by their absence). Memory timings are pretty adjustable with one or two anomalies. You are given the option of setting tRAS (the minimum time a bank has to stay open) of 2 cycles. Put simply, a bank's minimum operational time is a sum of the time taken to activate the row (tRCD) and the time taken to get the information out to the pins (CAS). Therefore tRAS has to be equal to or greater than tRCD + CAS. This is not a criticism of this motherboard at all, more of a look at the vagaries of an nForce2 BIOS.
The nForce2 features a number of FSB-to-DRAM ratios, some are highlighted below:
With integrated graphics, more bandwidth is better, even if that means we have to take account of the latencies imposed by the buffering between asynchronous FSB and DRAM speeds. You can set the on-board graphics' framebuffer all the way up to 128MB. Remember that the buffer is shared with system memory; just make sure you're running 512MB of RAM for fluid operation.
Some of the features on offer. An impressive line-up.
There are no voltage adjustments whatsoever. This falls in line with the kind of system that the MN31N is destined to be housed in. Normally I'd downmark a motherboard for such an oversight. In this case, though, the lack of voltage adjustment is perfectly valid. Note how high the chipset voltage is. ~ 1.70v is above specification.
A far more adjustable BIOS than I was expecting. If you ignore the lack of voltage adjustment, it's about as tweakable as any other nForce2's.
