Blackops BIOS - a quick look at the key features

You can control EVERYTHING...

Ok, so you’ve read all about the Blackops hardware… time for us to see what the Foxconn gurus have been up doing to make the best use of the Intel X48 chipset at the heart of this mainboard. Well, to cut a long story short, they’ve looked at pretty much every timing, stepping, delay, voltage, speed, clock and kitchen sink and made it all adjustable, (ok, not the last one but pretty much all the rest).

The BIOS we looked at was still in development and has plenty of features still to come, such as the ability to bypass the Penryn sub -40⁰ problem that meant you had to wait for the chip to warm back up before being able to restart. So soon, with the Blackops BIOS, you’ll be able to chill that CPU as low as you want before starting up.

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Now I know that silly temps like that are in the realms of the dry ice and liquid Nitrogen guys but there’s plenty in the BIOS for the less extreme clocker and even the novice, starting out on the road to goatee beards, obsessive clocking and the ability to calculate multiplier timings in their sleep.

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Besides the twin BIOS chips, each with the ability to store up to 8 separate BIOS configs, you get a BIOS boot menu, letting you choose which chip to boot from. So you can run a beta BIOS on one chip, safe in the knowledge that you can just drop back to the other chip should anything terminal happen.

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And the Blackops mainboard is a forgiving soul too. Foxconn has worked hard to make the Item Help section on the right of the BIOS screen far more informative, so novices will have more knowledge of what each adjustable does and even what settings are recommended. And to save any tinkering frying you expensive components, the Blackops has a built in monitoring function that, should nothing happen for a set time on boot, will reboot dropping the system back to failsafe defaults.

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And that’s enough from me, I’ll just let you ogle at the screens… and enjoy Foxconn’s references to Unreal Tournament with the clock speeds.