BIOS
A quick look at the BIOS, as it offers some reasonable manipulation. Intel have launched their own enthusiast boards, with the Blue Mountain 2 the last one to pass through the doors of Hexus. We're pretty sure that some variant of the i875P Bonanza will hit retail shelves.
The Intel 875BZ, or Bonanza, shipped to us with a development BIOS. We updated that to a production BIOS (PO3) but saw little overall difference. Hyper-Threading technology is present, as expected. A 800FSB (quad-pumped) motherboard requires a new breed of Pentium 4 processor. Enter the "C" series. As the above picture shows, the processor here, provided by Intel, is a 3GHz / 800FSB model, with a lower multiplier of 15x. The Canterwood supports present 533FSB CPUs too. System memory is set to the optimum 400MHz (DDR-400).
The all-important memory timings are adjustable in a sub-screen; the biggest difference this time 'round is that setting different parameters here do make a difference in benchmark results. The initial dual-channel Granite Bay motherboard seemed to lock-out the timings' effects within an OS environment. You could key in whichever timings you liked, but benchmarks results were identical. Incidentally, a quirky aspect of this board was the inability to run at a RAS-to-CAS (tRCD) setting to 2 clocks, even at DDR266 speeds. SDRAM frequency can be set to 266, 333, and 400MHz. A new, official DDR-400 specification from JEDEC ensures that Intel haven't jumped the memory speed gun.
Intel consider overclocking as burning-in. The options are limited, as the screengrab shows. +4.0% gives an overall running speed of 3120MHz / 208FSB. AGP/PCI speeds are adjustable too.
A reasonable, intuitive BIOS, only marred by a lack of voltage adjustment. The reference nature of this board comes through with only adjustable feature being the Gigabit LAN with CSA.
