Bios and Stability
My favourite BIOS, AMIBIOS makes a welcome appearance on the SS51G. It's intuitive, easy to navigate and tweakable. Surprising for such a small unit.Voltages cannot be modified at all. This is perhaps a good thing as the limited cooling is already stretched at default voltages. Adding extra heat into such a small enclosure is a sure-fire way of frying some component needlessly.
The CPU clock can be regulated from 100 - 166FSB in 1MHz increments, useful for fine-tuning your overclock. Between 100 - 132MHz, the CPU:DRAM ratio can be set to either 1:1, 3:4 or 3:5. In effect, at 132MHz, with a ratio of 3:5, you would be running RAM at 220MHz. Between 133 and 166MHz, the options change to 4:3, 1:1 and 4:5 respectively. The latter ratio indicates PC2700 support for 533FSB processors.
System performance can be set to various modes, the above shows the most performance-enhancing.
Various extras can be manipulated from within BIOS.
I've included this lengthy shot to show you a couple of things. Firstly, the Fan AutoGuardian seemingly halves the speed of the supplied Sunon fan. This should allow you to watch DVDs in peace. The downside is the increased temperature. You can also set a temperature that triggers the speeding-up of the fan.
Secondly, the PSU has quite a rough ride here, evidenced by the poor voltage regulation, 11.45v on the 12v isn't particularly good. The low Vcore of 1.40v, under moderate BIOS load, is also of some concern.
Although voltages were of some concern to me, stability proved to be excellent. SiS' 'boards have historically proved stable, this was the case here. No untoward crashes with strict memory timings used.
The BIOS is much like any other in most respects. You can manipulate power, peripheral and boot-up options easily enough
