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The BIOS

We have seen a wide range of BIOSes for SFFs and they go from absolute barebone to very feature rich. The Kloss AMI based BIOS tends to lean more towards barebone side of things. The only real enthusiast options are the processor multiplier selection and very slight adjustments of the FSB which ranges from 0.7% (that's underclocking, not over) to 6.7%.

• FSB Increments - 0.7%, 1.8%, 3.6%, 4.7%, 6%, 6.7%

There are no options to adjust the memory timings which puts a bit of hurt on the benchmarks as will be seen later on.

The Main BIOS menu is pretty simple. Listed is the basic CMOS information as well memory installed as well as the BIOS revision in plane view which is a nice touch.

The Advanced BIOS menu is where most of the options are. One of the things that should probably be fixed is an extra line return at the top of the menu which hides Advanced Chipset Configuration until Page Down or the arrow button is hit. This is a poor design decision as there is no scroll bar or any sort of visual indicator to show the presence of more menu items. Turbo Mode Frequency is where the slight overclocking options are while Silent Mode Frequency is the fan control option; the higher the value, the quieter the system should run.

CPU Configuration has two options; processor multiplier adjustment and toggling HyperThreading. For those interested in a quieter running PC, the multiplier adjustment may be of interest otherwise coupled with the limited BIOS options, this is not much use. In any event, it is a good idea to double check the multiplier value as it defaulted to the lowest value after a BIOS flash.

IDE Configuration worked well enough with the default values. For those with NCQ supported drives, Enhanced mode and AHCI should probably be used. This menu also makes a note that only booting off the primary SATA channel is supported at the moment.

SuperIO has the usual options of configuring legacy ports and their associated IRQs.

Hardware Health Configuration has the processor temperature, CPU fan speed and also the speed of the rear fan. It is good to see the low fan speeds as they translate into low noise during usage.

USB configuration gets its own seperate menu in Advanced Chipset Configuration. There are several PCI Express related options here none of which really need to be adjusted. Aperture size can be played around with but that's about it really.

I'm going to rant about the USB configuration menu a little bit here. After a BIOS flash, it turned off USB2 which is kind of silly considering this is a 915 based machine. There is also an option to toggle Legacy USB support from the main Advanced menu page which is not intuitive as USB options are not all grouped together. There are several USB 2.0 controller modes including low-speed (1.5 Mbps), full speed (12Mbps) and hi-speed (480Mbps). This should always default to high-speed but in the case of the Kloss it did not.

There are options for both supervisor and user passwords. Supervisor will let the end user muck around in the BIOS while the user password will actually let the machine boot. Great way to annoy roommates or immediate family if you have beef with them about something totally unrelated.

The power options are not usually of much interest to me but the Restore on AC Power Loss option is worth discussing briefly. There is no hard switch for the PSU unit, so with Power On selected, the Kloss will fire up immediately. There is also a stay off function as well as last state. I tend to get nervous when the machine starts up immediately when plugged in after blowing out a PSU in a freak accident but that's just me.

The option to toggle between a classic POST screen and a full screen display with the manufacturer logo can be set here as well as the boot order of the various devices.