BIOS
Given great features and a good layout, the next thing to check in order to appease the enthusiast is a good BIOS. Good hardware and layout can mean nothing if the BIOS lets it all down, not allowing the owner to tweak his or her new possession.Like the vast majority of AWARD BIOSes, the action is in the Advanced BIOS Features and related sections.
With an Extreme Edition CPU, with on-chip L3 cache memory, the PF4 gives you the option to disable it. Handy for the reviewer with an ES 3.4GHz Extreme Edition, who can then make the CPU into any regular Northwood core P4, just by doing so and changing the multiplier.
The health monitoring section lets you monitor system temperatures and voltages, whilst also letting you control the CPU fan, and seemingly the northbridge and PWM fans too. You get to set a fan range, and a 5°C modifier for that range, so you can accurately set fan speed for the common operating temperatures of your CPU.
The PF4 lets you set a staggering 510MHz front side bus clock (over 2GHz effective) for some unknown reason. You can lock the ICH6/R host clock and the PEG16X clockgen for asynchrous overclocking support with locked busses. You also get up to 2.2V Vdimm (up from 1.8V standard on DDR-II DRAMs), but ECS have limited the voltage range for CPU Vcore to a slightly weak 1.5875V. Not too bad for Prescott CPUs that start at 1.4V or less, but for the 1.5V Extreme Edition, it's slightly less appealing.
It's a standard AWARD BIOS with ECS's specific tweaks and it never skipped a beat during testing. Good stuff.
