BIOS Photo's

BIOS Photo's

Forgive me the horrible photo's, they where quickly done with a simple point and shoot camera. First off, you always want to check your voltages and temperatures. A good motherboard shows them all.

Once you've setup your standard items, just move onwards to Frequency and Voltage control where you'll get in to the startup menu for all your tweaking desires. If you want to do it simple, head on over towards Dummy O.C. (which is the worst and dumbest name eVGA could pick, why would you insult your customers by calling them dummy?), call it "Easy OC" or something.

Anyway, what this setting does is to apply a series of optimal voltages and multipliers. Your processor will get a 150 MHz QPI (FSB) treatment which results into as standard, a quite decent overclock. Any current Core i7 processor will be able to operate at that QPI under the condition you have good enough cooling.

Of course you can also apply everything manually as well, the mainboard does seem to be a tweakers nirvana.

Memory wise you can select up-to 1600 MHz at default. If you are playing around with a QPI overclock, you can tweak it a bit better here. This is also the spot where you can enter your latency timings.

Missing feature - apparently the motherboard does not read out EPP/XMS profiles. So it'll pick the JEDEC (save) timings. So here's where you need to tweak a little yourself to gain some extra memory bandwidth over baseline performance.

Voltage control. What can I say .. a WIDE variety of ranges on everything. This was done really well and you'll find that for any overclocking situation there's just no real limitation and the voltage span on all options are really large.

What's lovely is that you can save and load up-to eight different tweaking profiles. These save your voltages, timings, multipliers .. whatever. With so many tweaking options, there was no way we could not overclock at the very least a little. Head on to the next page where we take the processor towards another level.