Before we dive straight into the BIOS itself, I just want to talk about the LCD Poster which is included with the Asus Blitz Formula and is directly related to the BIOS.

This desktop LCD module is designed to offer POST/BIOS information on the screen and so give you an idea of exactly what is going on, either right or wrong. As the system goes through POST, the messages on the screen tell you what is or should be happening next. Once POST has completed, the LCD will display the time in 24 hour format; Hours-Minutes-Seconds. The unit is wired to the system and plugs into a header on the motherboard, which is then mounted into the I/O shield. From there, the 50cm or so of wire lets you put the display where you see fit. The LCD Poster is backlit with a blue LED which with the latest BIOS at least can be turned on and off.

Ok, the BIOS itself we are looking at is version 1101 which had a couple of changes from the initially installed version (1095 if I remember correctly), one being the afore mentioned ability to turn off the back lighting on the LCD Poster. The BIOS is of the American Megatrends flavour and as you would expect from an Asus board of this level, it has been packed with features. The Main page displays the usual information of the system time, drives and SATA configuration, which can be expanded or entered to adjust further settings.

The next page is the Extreme Tweaker page. As it's name suggest, this is were enthusiasts will be spending most of their time in the BIOS, and it has options for every conceivable setting (and a few inconceivable ones) you can think of; it scrolls down twice it's own height and pretty much every entry can be expanded to find further settings. CPU features and options, Memory, Voltages, Northbridge and Southbridge options, LED options (I'll get to those in a moment), all can be tweaked here. Conversely, if it all looks a bit overwhelming, you can leave pretty much everything on automatic and still get an overclock to be proud of (in theory). Like the Asus P5K Deluxe we reviewed before it, overclocking with the Blitz Formula is very easy but to go that little bit extra you will want to play with the settings. Options for setting voltages for separate memory channels are present, as well as reference voltages for the memory controller.

The Advanced page offers options for all the peripherals and ports on the board, such as the Network ports, USB ports and other onboard devices. The one exception here is the included sound card which can be set by the BIOS despite it's 'external nature; the card is more of a riser card than a separate module. Also in here are further chipset and CPU options.

Power options dictate how the motherboard can be started and can be found on the Power page (imagine that). Also with in the power page is the Hardware Monitor which is an extensive page unto itself. Options for overheat protection of many of the main components such as the Southbridge, Fan control of the optional side fans are all here, as well as monitoring of temperatures and voltages.

The Boot page is where you dictate what to boot from as well as apply your security settings. Nothing much to see here really other than to say that Asus make sure you can boot from pretty much any device it's possible to boot from.

The Tools page offers options for storing a couple of profiles, useful for Overclocking, but if 2 profiles are not enough, you can save as many as you like to a FAT formatted drive such as a flash drive using the O.C. Profile feature. This is sort of like a separate BIOS used purely for the loading and saving of BIOS profiles. Also here you can flash the BIOS from within the BIOS, or to be more precise from within the EZ Flash ROM Utility. Much like the O.C. Profile utility, this a separate entity within the BIOS screens.

The last screen offers Save and Exit options.

So, within that lot we mentioned LED options. Voltminder LED's. These are small LED's that are dotted around the mainboard itself and indicate the levels of 'safety' of the voltages going to various components. For example, just next to the DIMM slots is a tiny LED which changes colour; green for normal, yellow for high, red for crazy volt levels. This isn't the only LED's but does make up the majority. There is just above the SATA ports an activity LED, but mostly these various LED's monitor voltages. In the case of the Northbridge LED, you can switch this in the BIOS from FSB Termination to Northbridge Voltages as you see fit. In the picture above, you can see that the LED's above the Front Panel connections are blue, the number of which indicate the system is running at a high frequency; the more blue LED's that are lit, the higher the frequency. We've looked at the LCD Poster before, but when you couple it with all these indicators on the board itself, it's very easy to tell at a glance what sort of setup is running, and the general 'health' of the system, and all without looking at your monitor or in the BIOS.

Testing

Test Setup: Intel E6420 @ 2.13GHz, 2x 1GB Patriot PC2-6400, HIS HD 2600 Pro, Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit.

For comparison we will be using the previously reviewed MSI P6N Sli Platinum 650i based motherboard and the Asus P5K Deluxe.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra 2007 - Our standard synthetic suite gets an upgrade. We like to use Sandra (System Analyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) to collect some numbers as a base. The numbers collected are consistent and are easily comparable between systems during tests.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.2, 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.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex v170b2 was used to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress v4.2.1.188 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The Second Renaissance Part 1, 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.

DVD Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Photoshop CS2 Driver Heaven Test - Photoshop is perhaps the defacto standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is so popular, we incorporated Driver Heaven's latest test into our review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

3DMark06 - We run the full suite of tests offered by 3DMark06 at 640x480 and collect the total 3DMark score and CPU score.

Quake 4 @ 640x480, HQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed, something that Quake 4 depends on for decent game play at any resolution. Higher scores are better.

NEXT