BIOS
BIOSes play an important part in a number of potential buyers' minds. Let's see how this one fares against the competition.
Most BIOSes are split into various sections. One such section usually controls all the overclocking and tweaking options. As expected, the P4B Ultra, being a retail motherboard, does cater for those that wish to extract maximum performance from their motherboard.
The DRAM clock can be set independently of the FSB to 133FSB, 166FSB, 200FSB and SPD. 200FSB is extremely flaky at best. Running your RAM asynchronously causes latency penalties, but the higher bandwidth on offer usually compensates. DRAM timings can be set to pre-defined levels or manually. I've chosen to go with the most aggressive for testing.
Voltages are slightly conservative. Vcore can be adjusted only +/- 0.1v. As most P4 motherboards tend to undervolt, having the maximum 1.6/1.625v (depending upon which P4 you have) only gives you around 1.55v under load. DDR voltage, though, sees a healthier 2.8v on offer. Depending on how you've set the on-board jumper, your FSB choices will either be 100 - 200FSB or 133 - 200FSB in 1MHz increments.
Being VIA's latest P4 chipset, the P4B Ultra features 8x AGP support if your card is compliant. You can manually set the AGP driving values to a number of alpha values. I didn't notice much change in performance with differing strengths selected.
Once again we seem to have a large deviation in reported CPU temperatures. Using a reasonable air cooler and 2.8GHz CPU we're shown a BIOS load temperature of 27c. As much as I'd like to believe this is the case, I know from experience that it's far closer to 45c. Why can't temperatures be standardised across motherboards ?.
Being a motherboard that uses a number of on-board jumpers, RAID and the audio support is toggled on/off via a jumper. I'd like to see everything adjustable from within BIOS. Makes life that little bit easier.
The BIOS seems to cater for OEMs rather than enthusiasts. If you're looking for minimal overclocking, this may be fine for you.
