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The P5N32-SLI Deluxe has a fairly standard AMI BIOS.

As you can see, the main page looks very familiar :-) - and the sample IDE channel configuration also does not hold any surprises. The "System Information" screen shows the BIOS version, processor type and speed as well as the number of cores and size of system memory.

The Advanced menu is where all the interesting settings are. The overclocking options are split between the JumperFree and CPU configuration screens - I really would prefer it if the BIOS writers kept it together on one screen.

I do like the use of the help panel on the right; lately we've been seeing more BIOS writers finally put meaningful descriptions of the choices available on the right.

I liked that not only were CPU Vcore and memory voltage adjustable, but also the FSB termination voltage and North and South bridge voltages were individually tweakable.

Under the "Performance Options" of the JumperFree menu we can set processor FSB and the memory clock independently, manually configure memory timings and also enable or disable FSB and Memory optimization modes. I found that the system was more stable when overclocked with both memory and FSB optimization enabled.

Somewhat unusually, this BIOS sets the FSB in frequency equivalent to single data rate busses. In reality the P4 uses a Quad data rate bus, so to calculate what the "actual" FSB is, divide the number shown on this screen by four. (ie 1000MHz here means a 250MHz FSB, which at 16x multiplier means the processor would run at 4GHz.)

The spread spectrum menu allows you to enable or disable spread spectrum modes for PCIe, SATA and LDT.

As usual, the BIOS lives up to ASUS-quality standards. All of the expected options (and more!) are there. How far we can really push the board with these options still remains to be seen.