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The BIOS is usual EPoX fare and you can tell it's geared towards the power and performance user. It's nice to see good support for SCSI devices since you can easily shut down the Highpoint from the BIOS and set it to boot from a SCSI card very easily. Being a SCSI user this is very welcome and it's not something you always see, especially with Promise controllers on board that like to be enabled all the time.
You have the strange option of turning off the support for SSE instructions on the CPU if you are using an Athlon XP processor but we can't think of a reason why you'd want to bar some compatibility issues.
The BIOS also supports switchable support for MPS 1.1 and 1.4 and while it's predominantly used with multi processor systems, it does offer up extra PCI bus control for single CPU machines and you can turn on and off the on chip APIC hardware that runs all the required functionality.
Being a performance biased EPoX board, you have massive flexibility in your DDR SDRAM setup. Everything from DRAM clock to all the usual DRAM timing options are present and correct. You also have support for adjusting DRAM queue depth and the command rate, something that's usually automatically controlled. Being able to adjust it manually means the difference between able to boot a stick of memory at 2T at high bus speeds when maybe the BIOS might try to force 1T on another board. Being KT333, you can of course run the memory bus asynchronously to the processor bus all the way up to 166MHz cpu bus clock when you must run synchronous. This gives you DDR333/PC2700 support at 133MHz cpu bus clock.
AGP wise you can adjust all the normal features including AGP2X/4X and turn on and off fast writes.
You have support for all the southbridge features via the Integrated Peripherals section which houses the usual pair of OnChip IDE and OnChip PCI sub menus and control over the SuperIO controller plus the usual USB options. The board ran my all USB keyboard and mouse combo (Apple Pro USB keyboard with a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical hooked up to the right hand port on the keyboard) without any issue as any recent board will be able to do.
Audio wise if you are using the provided AC'97 hardware (I used a Soundblaster Audigy throughout testing) you have all the options there to control it.
Overall it's a very comprehensive BIOS and evidently focussed at the performance enthusiast with a whole load of performance related options to keep even the most BIOS happy tweaker occupied for a while.
Finally, voltage tweakers will be happy to hear that you can give up to 2.2V to any AMD processor (including Thoroughbreds) and up to 3.2V to the memory slots for some proper voltage based abuse of your favourite memory sticks.
Bundle wise, the packaging is pretty impressive with a slide out tray in an attractive red and white box holding the board, the manuals (for board and HPT controller), the driver CD, the IDE and floppy cables and the lone USB 2.0 backplane connector for 2 extra ports (for 4 in total, 2 shy of the bridge limit of 6).
It's one of the better bundles that we've seen presentation wise. Attractive and a nice touch from EPoX.
As far as the manual goes it's very easy to read, well sectioned and it's easy to find what you are looking for. No complaints from this reviewer as far as the manual goes.
Another set of thumbs up for EPoX as far as BIOS, bundle and presentation and the manual go.
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