The BIOS
The AMI BIOS is the heart and soul of the ASUS P4C800-E. This BIOS is a popular choice of many OEM system builders, but the version implemented by ASUS allows quite a bit of tweaking, which is something I cannot say for a builder such as Dell.
You'll be able to tweak many of your CPU options in the Advanced CPU settings, though don't get too excited with the multiplier setting as chances are you won't be able to do anything with it unless your CPU is an engineering sample. The board allows some basic overclocking, such as a 5% to 30% OC, but by setting the AI Overclock Tuner to manual, you can edit the FSB itself.
Naturally, as you begin to overclock components, you'll need to be able to increase the voltages to maintain stability. You can go as high as 1.95v for the CPU, 2.85v for ram, and 1.80v for AGP. I would have liked to have seen some higher memory voltages as many of todays PC4000 modules can handle up to 2.9v, which may be necessary at 250FSB+.
The memory timing option are decent, allowing you to change almost everything you need. There's also an acceleration mode to squeeze more performance out of your setup. Make sure you have ram that can handle it though.
The Instant Music option is a setting for music listening. Here's a bit from their site:
"If you are using your system for music enjoyment and still going through the long process of Windows' Media Player, then you are way behind. Music is a good way to balance out your hectic day, but why waste time on waiting for Windows. ASUS' Instant Music feature allows you to listen to your favorite songs with only a few push on the keyboard."
Basically, it gives you the ability of listening to music CDs without loading up the OS. How useful this is will depend on you, but as you can see in the above pic, I didn't really care for it.
Overclocking
We got a little hint of what this board is able to do at 1:1 CPU and memory in our recent PC4000 memory reviews. 285FSB was as high as we've gotten, but the system wasn't stable at all. At 280FSB, the system ran fairly well, completing benchmarks without problems.
I was pretty certain we could push the motherboard and CPU combo higher though, so we lowered the divider, removing the memory from the equation, and proceeded to push the P4C800-E.
We were able to get as high as 290FSB using our Swiftech H20-8500, and bumping the vCore up to 1.90v. 1.95v didn't help matters, so it looked like this is as far as the board will go. The system was shakey though, and a drop down to 286FSB was much more stable.
Test Setup
ABIT IC7-MAX3: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Ram, ATI AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB SATA Seagate, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.6.
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Ram, ATI AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB SATA Seagate, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.6.
Test software will be:
AVI-to-MPG Encoding
Unreal Tournament 2003
Splinter Cell
Memory timings for the motherboards will be 2-3-3-6 at 200FSB and 2.5-4-3-6 for 250FSB.
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