Asus P5B-E Review - PAGE 3William Henning - Monday, December 18th, 2006
The Asus P5B-E comes with a standard AMI BIOS.
The main menu makes lets you change the date and time, choose a "Legacy Diskette A" (and they are right! Floppy drives are basically obsolete now that some BIOS); configure the SATA channels or IDE channels, and examine the system information.
The SATA configuration screen show a lot of detail about the drive on the chosen channel, and allows setting its more common configuration parameters
The IDE Configuration also controlls the eSATA port and SATA7, as well as the single IDE channel available for an optical drive and/or older hard drive.
The System Information screen shows the AMI BIOS version, processor type and speed, and total system memory.
The Advanced menu is where all the enthusiasts will be tweaking their system - and it gives us plenty to tweak.
Under the JumperFree Configuration menu is the majority of the parameters used to overclock systems! After we turn off the "AI Tuning" we can manually set the CPU FSB, the memory frequency, PCIe frequency and PCI fequency as well as disable Spread Spectrum and control important voltages - Vcore, Vram, FSB termination, NB, SB and ICH voltages too!
The USB configuration screen lets us set USB compatibility modes.
The CPU configuration menu lets us modify the CPU multiplier - while it does not unlock the multiplier upwards, it did unlock our E6400 downwards, allowing us to choose between 6x, 7x and 8x; it also lets you control VT and SpeedStep.
The Chipset menu has only one entry, one that takes you to memory timing control options.
The Onboard Devices menu lets us enable/disable the on-board peripherals such as audio, firewire, lan, eSATA, serial port and parallel port.
The PCI/PnP menu lets us control the PnP settings presented to the operating system as well as change default interrupt allocations.
The Power menu lets us control suspend modes, go to the APM configuration, and look at the Hardware Monitor.
The APM menu lets us configure power loss and wakeup events.
The Hardware Monitor lets you control fans, and shows the current Vcore and current values for the 3.3, 5V and 12V rails.
The Boot menu lets us control boot priority and security
The Boot priority lets us configure four levels of boot devices.
The security settings allows us to set a user and a supervisor password for the BIOS.
The Boot Settings menu controls the quick boot, logo, numlock and error options.
The Tools menu lets us go to the excellent EZ Flash utility or to the overclocking profile management.
EZ Flash is a tool for updating the BIOS - and it can read USB drives! No floppy needed!
The OC Profile configuration lets us save two BIOS profiles for different configurations - for example, you could use Profile 1 for "Fastest Stable Overclock" and Profile 2 for "Bleeding edge crashes sometimes but I want to show off" settings.
The exit menu just lets you save or discard your changes; or in a pinch, reload the default settings.
Whew... a lot of BIOS screens!
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