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BIOS and Overclocking

FIC, like many motherboard manufacturers, has two annoying features that are enabled whenever the BIOS is reset to defaults: full screen Logo on boot and quick boot. Neither of these are useful to overclockers because they obscure the information that helps us diagnose what's happening at boot up.

However, when you disable the fullscreen Logo and quickboot, the bottom quarter of the boot up screen has a "Magic Health" diagnostic screen made popular by Epox. This "Magic Health" screen shows, at a glance, current temperatures, fanspeeds, and voltages. Very nifty.

Magic Health: Click for the entire span

Overclocking features including very robust FSB/DRAM settings under the Frequency/Voltage setup screen, and Vcore options in the Voltage submenu there.

FSB in the BIOS

Voltage Setting in the BIOS

BIOS Overview:

RAM - Up to 3GB, DDR266, DDR333, DDR400
FSB - 100-255Mhz in 1Mhz increments
Clock Multiplier - Auto, Manual from 5x to 23x (0.5x increments up to 16.5x, 1.0x increments thereafter)
PCI Divider - Automatic, up to 1/5 @ 166FSB
Vcore - 1.400v to 1.850v in 0.025 increments 1.850v to 2.100v in 0.050 increments

Look ma, no need to unlock the chip!

This section has been updated on December 13th to clarify what is really happening in terms of "chip unlocking".

What's AWESOME about the AN19E, which is also what you'll find on Epox's 8K9A KT400 board, is that you will be able to change your Thoroughbred XP's clock multiplier properly without needing to modify the chip in any way. Palomino chips will still need to have their L1 bridges re-connected in order for the board to properly change multiplier. You can look at more details on this discussion on the unlocking page of our Epox 8K9A2+ article. We managed to overclock our 2100XP to a 2200XP (133 X 14) by bumping the Vcore up to 1.725V.

We wanted to push the chip some more so we lowered the multiplier and pushed up the core CPU speed. Unfortunately, the AN19E doesn't allow you to set the PCI clock divider, and the clock divider automatically maxes out at 1/5 starting at 133Mhz, so any FSB changes would automatically overclock all your other components. After a lot of testing, we only managed to push the chip to 145Mhz X 12=1740Mhz or 150Mhz x 11.5 = 1725Mhz. Other combinations resulted in various levels of stability but those two were the best compromise between performance, FSB and multiplier. We could post as high as 155Mhz FSB, but Windows XP would lock up right at load since our components probably didn't like running at 77Mhz/38Mhz (AGP/PCI clock speeds).

The AN19E is also relatively good for RAM tweaking. All the RAM timing tweaks you can ever want are available. The RAM type is chosen via a drop list that includes DDR333 and DDR400. The actual RAM clock speed, though, changes as you change the FSB. With our 145Mhz x 12 setting for instance, RAM was running at 362Mhz and 424Mhz when set to DDR333 or DD400 types, respectively.

The AGP/PCI and DRAM clock speeds are all displayed in the Frequency & Voltage screen as you tweak the different settings. This is really helpful for those of you fine tuning your settings, and we found it invaluable while keeping track of which values were stable and yielding good performance results. Many motherboards are now incorporating this, including the recent Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra we reviewed (which won our Overclocker's Choice award), and it's a real convenience.