ECS is using the Phoenix Award BIOS, and while they have not been known to be heavy on the overclocking options, their BIOS has been pretty solid of late.
Your intro screen into the BIOS is something most of us are familiar with, nothing out of the ordinary here. Lets look into a couple of menus to see if we can find anything of interest, shall we.
The Advanced Menu is where we set some CPU basics as well as who boots first etc. This is a screen most of us are familiar with, nothing happening here as it relates to overclocking. Lets move along...
This we need to pay attention to as here is where we set the SATA ports to act as basic IDE drives controllers or enable them into a RAID function. Be careful of what you change here, as ability to boot at all could lie in this screen alone.
Although in the manual there was a couple of settings in the BIOS for CPU Clock ratio (manipulating our multiplier) there was no such option in the updated BIOS I installed. The DIMM/NB/CPU Voltage Control allows us to manipulate those voltages, unfortunately, by not very much. As you can see, we are only allowed to up the VCore by a small amount. The only option for overclocking is going to be under the CPU Host/SRC/PCI menu, unfortunately we are extremely limited here. The stock settings for my E6400 is 266/100/33, allowing me to only chose 333/100/33 if I want to do some overclocking. In my opinion, a much to large a gag to make with the limited VCore ability.
Quick Notes / Observations
Installation was fairly easy, and the driver CD included installed all of the necessary drivers with a single click. This is a nice change from installing each driver you want installed and then waiting several reboots later to use the system. Within the first screen you could chose subsets of what was to be installed mind you, it was automatic after that.
Using the stock WinFlash (AwardFlash) from ECS to update the BIOS within windows has an extreme DOS feel to it, like it does not belong on a windows platform modifying your BIOS. It worked fine mind you, but did not give me that warm and cozy a properly made windows program would.
Overclocking with the ECS P965T-A might be a challenge in that I have very little room to manipulate the VCore or DIMM voltage. Also noting that our next step is way to aggressive for said manipulations.
Several attempts to overclock failed, I was not able to attain one fraction of an overclock. I do not believe this is the limitation of the CPU or chipset, as other readings on the web show both the E6400 and the Intel 965 chipset have ample room to overclock with. This is a pure limitation in the BIOS offering put forth by ECS in this particular motherboard.
Test System
ECS P965T-A Motherboard, 2GB Patriot PC2-5300, Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo, HIS X1600Pro, Samsung 250GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows XP SP2
Comparison System
I was going to compare the ECS P965T-A to an older review of an Asus A8R32-Deluxe or even an MSI ***, unfortunately, all of those had been tested with previous generations (can we say previous already for the Pentium D and AMD 939's?) of CPU. When I started compiling the numbers, I saw that it was in no way a good comparison for this board as much as it was a absolute overwhelming performance by the C2D processor.
With this information I changed to a newly acquired Foxconn 975X7AB utilizing the same processor. The systems Specs are: Foxconn 975X7AB Motherboard, 2GB Patriot PC2-5300, Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo, HIS X1600Pro, Samsung 250GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II Drive, Windows XP SP2
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:
- 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.
– Another standard benchmark suite that you, the reader, can easily download and compare to give you an idea of where your system stands in relation to the solutions we are testing.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
– 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.
– How good is the CPU / Video / Memory communication? We strip down a demo of Q4 to 640x480 HQ and make the processor do a lot more work then it normally has to.
Subsytem Testing – We test the on-board sound performance using and the on-board NIC(s) using .
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