Asus has used AMI BIOS for sometime now, it seems every time I get my hands on an Asus motherboard they have tweaked the BIOS to where it seems they can't tweak anymore, yet they continue to do so, lets look over what Asus has done to the P5WD2-E Premium's BIOS.

Your intro screen into the BIOS is something most of us are familiar with, nothing out of the ordinary here. Well, except Asus has decided to put some IDE controls on the main page (almost missed that). Delving into that screen, this is where we setup how SATA functions (IDE, AHCI or RAID), the “OnBoard IDE Operate mode” is only active when “Standard IDE” is the SATA mode selected. System information gives an overview of the systems general information, such as the BIOS version, CPU installed and system memory.

The Advanced Menu is where all of the fun happens, the sub menus from here are where we take control of the system.

First we will delve into the Onboard Devices screen, here we see the ability to choose the audio codec, our USB and NIC port functions as well as which mode our Marvell SATA_4 port is in, eSATA or SATA-II.

Turning our attention towards the Chipset sub-menu we see this is where the Memory timings are either automatic or manually controlled (interestingly enough, the manual talks to a selection of “DRAM ECC Mode [Auto]” directly under the SPD settings, this is obviously missing in my version of BIOS). We are also able to enable or disable the Asus Hyper Path 3 feature. The DRAM Throttling feature is an automated temperature throttle for over heating memory. Universal PCI-e speed is either X2(fast) or X1 (compatible). PEG is the PCI-e Graphics card slot(s), these controls allow you to manipulate the buffer (in as much as Auto / Long / Short), Root control, Link Mode (to assist in overclocking matching) and finally Slot Power, this allows you to Manipulate the power delivered to the PCI-e slot. I would leave this at Auto, either to little or to much could be detrimental to your graphics card.

PCIPnP has been around for awhile, there is no sense in going over this any further then saying this allows you to manipulate the PCI settings, but most everyone would leave these set to defaults.

USB configuration allows you to enable or disable you USB ports. Once enabled, you are prompted with further selection to the speed at which you want them to run at, you have the option of FullSpeed (12Mbps) or HiSpeed (480Mbps). We also have a configuration setting for USB Mass Storage devices, allowing for a delay so the drives can spin up properly, this is selectable in 10Sec increments from 10Sec to 40Sec.

Although this menu sounds exciting (it actually is if you have an unlocked CPU), its basically where we control the ancillary pieces of the CPU, like Thermal throttling and Microcode Updation (love that word).

JumperFree configuration is where the fun actually resides, there is a slew of options here (something Asus is very good at is giving you options). Lets go over these piece by piece shall we:

AI Overclocking allows you to overclock to your comfort, you can either do it in Manual mode (self explanatory), Auto Mode (the system determines the best Overclock), an Overclock Profile (Pre-Defined Overclocking profiles that are based on optimal stability, not necessarily performance) and AI NOS (Automated on the fly overclocking dependent on the current load of the system, more load, more clock).

Manual Mode is the only one where you truly manipulate the CPU / Memory, once selected you get CPU and DRAM Frequency options. The CPU options are laid out as FSB, realizing this is the CPU's FSB and not the motherboards, here is a correlation table:

These are not selected, rather you enter the CPU FSB, so in essence, you have a 1MHz increment ability with the P5WD2-E Premium.

DRAM frequency is somewhat (well OK, totally) dependent on the FSB set. You can leave it set to Auto even when you are manipulating the CPU Frequency, however most of us will tweak this as well (Auto has a tendency to sub rate the memory in comparison to the CPU). Depending on the CPU FSB selected, the available DRAM Frequencies would be:

Below the frequency settings are your other bus frequency settings (PCI-e and PCI) as well as voltage manipulation for Memory, VCore, FSB, MCH and ICH. Phewww, gone are the days of CPU only (I know, old timer), its no wonder we get so much headroom on these new motherboards. Memory can be selected from 1.80V to 2.4V in 0.05V increments (with exception to the 1.80 to 1.90 jump) or Auto, CPU or VCore has a range of 1.3000V to 1.7000V in 0.125V increments (or Auto as well). The FSB has a range of 1.20V to 1.50V in 0.10V increments, MCH goes from 1.50V to 1.65V in 0.05V increments and finally ICH has two selections, 1.05V or 1.20V.

The Power menu sets how the hardware responds to certain conditions, you might have heard this as ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). Although there isn't much here that isn't on most motherboards, I thought I should show it to you none-the-less.

Boot Settings is just that, who boots first and then if that is a non boot-able device, who follows. There is also a setting for enabling or disabling the boot screen Asus logo and of course to force the boot to halt in case of an error.

Quick Notes / Observations

Crossfire is performed automatically within the Asus P5WD2-E Premium motherboard, there is no jumpers to set, no BIOS settings to manipulate. Once a second card is detected, the PCI-e slot 16x1 moves from x16 to x8 as well as PCI-e slot 16x2. From there it is a simple proper driver install to take advantage of the Crossfire solution. This currently is a Windows only solution, although this is an ATI issue, it is an issue with a lot of enthusiasts out there. Although Linux is not my main system, every system but my Main system is.

The Intel HD audio supplied by the Realtek ALC882M, is nothing short of impressive. Not only the sound quality, the entire management system used is impressive, and something the nVidia lineup needs to take note of. The rear audio ports are completely software selectable, allowing you to plug your microphone into ANY port on the back and then define within Windows. Unfortunately there is no such program for Linux, forcing all of them to defaults.

Overclocking with Asus NOS, the Asus P5WD2-E Premium motherboard and a Intel Pentium 4 640 (3.2GHz Stock) yielded a result of an impressive 4.16GHz. A nice overclock for an automated program, showing there is something to this NOS solution. NOS actually got to 4+ Ghz by doing nothing more then increasing the FSB. There was no VCore or Memory Voltage increase. This is an impressive overclock to say the least, add to that we did nothing in the realm of increasing Voltages, it is very impressive. Next up was to see what we could do manually (30% OC is the maximum allowed via NOS). So going with no increase in Voltages netted us ~30% gain, I was hoping for more by adding some boost to the components. What I got was another notch, so to speak. I was able to boost the FSB to 275MHz (1,100 for the DDR2) giving me an overall clock of 4.4GHz (on air). An impressive overclock to be sure.

Test System: Asus P5WD2-E Premium Motherboard, 1GB (2x512 in Dual DDR2 Mode) OCZ PC2-5400, Intel Pentium4 640 (3.2GHz Stock), HIS X850XT IceQ-Turbo, Western Digital 250GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows XP SP2

I will be comparing the Asus P5WD2-E Premium to the previously reviewed ECS KN1. That systems Specs are: ECS KN1 Motherboard, 1GB (2x512 in Dual DDR Mode) Patriot, PC3200 / PC4200, AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Venice Core), Asus Silencer 6600GT, Western Digital 250GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows XP SP2

I am looking forward to this as we get to pit AMD vs Intel, the Intel 640 running at 3.2GHz matches the “rating” of the AMD 3200+, also note both are 64 bit processors (albeit we are testing on 32 bit platform), and although the graphics cards are different, we are not testing the graphics card in this scenario so this should have no effect.

Testing

Time for the testing phase, all tests are run 3 times and results are then averaged (unless otherwise noted). VL’s testing suite includes the following:

SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the SiSoft tests, higher numbers are better.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.3, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

HD Tach – Similar to SiSoft in that it does not necessarily give us real world indication of performance but does allow for baseline testing and efficiency reports of CPU utilization at maximum hard drive transfer rates.

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