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The BIOS in Detail

Since we're using the same BIOS as for the Ultra-D, there are very few changes to the SLI-DR's BIOS.

Like one of the myriad of custom chopper or custom car shows, DFI takes a basic Phoenix AwardBIOS and adds a lot of extra functionality to it DFI style. A couple menu options of note are the Genie BIOS and the CMOS Reloaded options which have been in several generations of DFI's products so far.

The standard CMOS Features menu is pretty boring. One thing of note is that it shows the onboard IDE/SATA controllers only while it is in non-RAID mode. Devices attached to the Silicon Image controller will not be listed on this particular screen.

There are probably several things that end users will want to change in the Advanced BIOS menu. First is disk boot priority. No recommendations here, you should know better than I do what you want to boot off of. The Hard Disk Boot Priority menu helps differentiate between which hard drive gets to boot first which is useful for those who decide to load up the drives on the SATA and IDE controllers. Scrolling down a bit is two options that probably need to be changed; generally we like to keep S.M.A.R.T. on even though its probably too late by the time you get the warning. Second is the Full Screen LOGO Show. DFI has a cool looking boot screen but those that are tweaking and setting up initially will likely prefer the familiar BIOS screen listing drives, some memory settings and what processor is being used.

DFI has a more extensive Integrated Peripherals menu than most though the default options should be fine for most people. Those that have a fancy sound card and are sure that they do not need to use the Karajan audio module can turn off AC97 audio to disable onboard sound. On a non-BIOS related note, there is a jumper on the board that can change the SPDIF source from the ALC850 controller to the nForce 4 MCP. The Karajan module does not need to be installed for the MCP to drive the SPDIF. We were unable to get any further clarifications between quality or perfomrance differences. Strangely enough the Silicon Image controller is not listed under here. There are some options to change the way that data is read over USB here. Vivian over at DFI did try to get some answers for us regarding the USB options -

"Isochronous transfers, periodic, continuous communication between host and device typically used for time relevant information. This transfer type also preserves the concept of time encapsulated in the data. This does not imply, however, that the delivery needs of such data are always time critical."

Changing this in BIOS will affect the reserved debug register in CK804 which will change certain transfer type formats , but NVIDIA's documentation does not give more details regarding effects with setting ISO or Non-ISO. Users should leave USB settings at the default value unless there is some compatibility issue in the USB device, as this is reserved for debug purposes."

Time sensitive devices can include things like USB headsets and TV Tuners. It does not sound like anything will get broken so it might be interesting to fool around with these settings especially for some of the more bandwidth hungry operations with USB HDs.

Power Management isn't my bag baby. No matter what the cover of the book says. My computer is generally always on, I don't care much for wake on LAN, sleeping hard drives or anything else but the options are here for those that do.

The only thing I ended up changing in PNP/PCI Configurations is setting the Init Display First option to PCIex.

The PC Health Status shows various statistics on what voltages are being fed to your board and lots of other good stuff including temperatures and such. Be sure to check out a recent article of ours that looks at the accuracy of BIOS reported voltages as compared to what a multimeter sees. For those that obsess about noise as I do, there are fan adjustment options although it would be great if there were more options than off / throttled and full blast.

All of the overclocking settings are stored under the Genie BIOS menu. There are a lot of things that stand out but several in particular will be highlighted. The front side bus is adjustable from 200-465. While a lot of manufacturers have absurdly high FSB values, there are few that can claim that the majority of the FSB range is usable. DFI will be one of those that can make such a claim as will be seen later on.

The Genie BIOS Settings menu is where DFI's magic really happens as this where all the overclocking voodoo is located. The front side bus is adjustable from 200-465Mhz - while a lot of manufactuers have a wide range of FSB values, most of them cannot claim that most are usable. DFI can as will be seen later on. The only change we would suggest is the ability to type in a value instead of forcing the user to scroll through 150+ values. Voltage adjustments for the CPU on the nF4 is pretty unique. Besides the standard 0.0125 voltage stepping, DFI also has something an additional fine tuner if you will - a multiplier can be applied to the base voltage to change the actual voltage fed to the CPU with even smaller increments. The ranges are listed in the table and with the highest multiplier of 1.36, a whopping 2.108v can be applied to the processor. Voltages are shown on the Genie BIOS page which is good but the functionality could be improved - DFI shows the current voltage setting that was saved. It might be more useful to show the default voltage instead since the set voltage is already shown through the voltage selection menu.

Memory voltage can be cranked up to 4.0v. Because the potential for damage is there, DFI limits the range by default from 2.5v to 3.2v. A jumper on the motherboard has to be set in order to unlock the 3.2-4.0v range.

The large set of memory dividers is also very welcome as this will allow again for better fine tuning of the memory when the FSB starts hitting the stratosphere. To help test for memory stability, DFI also has MemTest86+ built in as a BIOS option. With this enabled, after the post, MemTest86+ will launch. No CD required, all of this is stored on one of the onboard flash memory chips. How cool is that?

The only new option in the Genie BIOS that is not present on the nF4 Ultra-D is SiI3114 item that allows for some adjustments to the SiI controller including whether it should be simply a SATA controller or a RAID controller. Generally RAID1 arrays cannot be transported between different computers but RAID0 on the other hand is controller specific but there is option called SATA RAID BY OLD MB - this allows for RAID arrays built on the SiI 3114 controller on a non-RAID5 revision to be accessed and dumped to another disk.

That said there are a few options that might be better off in the Integrated Peripherals menu including the options for the SiI, the SATA ports from the MCP, the Firewire controller and finally the Marvell ethernet controller.

In addition to the very impressive voltage range and options, there is also the DFI exclusive, CMOS reloaded. After the initial post screen and boot detection, settings that are bootable are saved to the SEEPROM. The user then has the option of naming and saving this, or any other configuration with the CMOS reloaded configuration. Four save banks are available and at the whim of the user, each of these sets can be loaded. A cool future option may be a save to floppy disk option. I noticed the documentation mentioned that this would be useful for system integrators but I'm thinking that being able to trade configurations between friends with the same board might be kind of neat also.