The
BIOS is probably one of the top 10 reasons someone would build
their own PC instead of buying it off of an assembly line. The
assembly line ~$400 PC’s are fixed; you get what you get,
with minimal ability to modify performance. DFI uses the Award
BIOS (with the additional features Such as CMOS reloaded) as a
base for the BIOS on the Ultra-D.
Your
intro screen into the BIOS is something most of us are familiar
with, nothing out of the ordinary here. The same goes for the
“Advanced BIOS Features”, “Advanced Chipset
Features”, “Integrated Peripherals” etc. Looking
further, we quickly move over to the header that catches my
eye (did you see it too?), “Genie BIOS Setting”.
Once
in the sub-menu of the Genie BIOS we can see this is where all
of the excitement happens. We have “DRAM Configuration”,
Frequency controls and Voltage Controls. The FSB Bus Frequency
is 200 by default for the Venice core AMD Athlon 64's but you
can go as high as 456MHz here, a lofty goal for sure. The LDT/FSB
Frequency Ratio option configures the speed of the HT link through
the use of multipliers. Although we can not see what the “Auto”
selection uses for a multiplier, if we did select the maximum
of 5x on a stock 200MHz, then the HT link speed would be 1000MHz.
The LDT Bus Transfer Width controls the size of the upload and
download transfer pipe available. Everything I have read says
to leave it at the default of 16 up and 16 down. Nothing truly
explains it well, so unfortunately I must leave it incomplete
as well.
CPU/FSB
Ratio is the multiplier, remember with AMD64 CPU's you can step
down the multiplier to 4x all day long with no modifications required,
you just can't go higher then its stock multiplier. You can even
manipulate the PCI Express frequency, although at this early a
stage I am a little gun shy manipulating the PCIe bus. The K8
cool and quiet support is basically a throttle on the CPU, which
allows it to reduce operating frequency and VCore according to
the current workload of the CPU.
CPU
VID StartUp Value is the initial boost of VCore you want applied.
This can assist a picky CPU from the initial boot failure and
then quickly let the VCore drop down to a lower setting. I can
see this helping in certain scenarios, but I wonder if it is more
confusion then help in a lot of cases?
CPU
VID Control is actually the VCore adjustment; you don't want to
know how long it took me to figure this one out. You are able
to raise the VCore to 1.550V here, although I am still unsure
as to what “VID” actually stands for.
Then
there is CPU VID Control Special … hrmmm, comments? Well,
according to the downloaded manual, this is for “more options
to further adjust the voltage of the CPU”. Clear as mud,
right? Well further digging shows that this feature allows us
to go beyond the 1.550V ceiling in the CPU VID Control section,
all the way to 2.108V by way of percentage overdrive of your VID.
Your cooling better be up to the task if you choose anything beyond
1.550V, but with support up to and beyond 2.1 volts, those with
extreme cooling setups will find this a boon.
LDT
and Chipset Voltage Control are just that, 2 things you don't
see in many manufacturers BIOS settings. Initially I thought this
might be gimmicky, and as to LDT, it still could be, but as to
Chipset, I saw some definite ability to advance performance above
and beyond the base when this was tweaked a little higher. Good
thing, in this case, that DFI employs an active cooling mechanism
for the Chipset.
Delving
into the DRAM sub menu we see all of the variables any memory
tweaker would ever want to see. I have to be totally honest
here, I didn't even know what everything on this page did without
research, and I wonder if there are more than 10 people who
actually would. However, there are definitely enough items here
to tweak to your hearts content and to others misery of confusion.
The main item is the DRAM voltage option which allows for a
maximum of 3.2v for your memory. This should be enough for even
the most hardened overclocker, but if you really must have more,
DFI have you covered, since the board can supply up to 4v to
the memory (should you have the balls and the cooling for this)
via a jumper on the motherboard. DRAM memory frequency is set
via a series of ratios against the CPU bus speed.
CMOS
Reload is a unique feature to DFI. This gives the user the ability
to save different BIOS settings and recall them at POST with
a simple Hot Key that you assign. I can see several advantages
to this in the review world as well as a few in the real world,
especially when tweaking for that ultimate overclock.
Test
System: DFI LANParty nF4 Ultra-D Motherboard, 1GB (2x512
in Dual DDR Mode) Patriot, PC3200 / PC4200, AMD Athlon 64 3200+
(Venice Core), ASUS N5900 Extreme 128MB, Hitachi Deskstar 80GB,
8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA Drive, Windows XP SP2
Comparison
System: ASUS P5GDC-Deluxe Motherboard, 1GB (2x512 in
PC2), Kingston HyperX PC2-5400, Intel Pentium 520 (2.8 GHz), HIS
X850XT IceQ Turbo-II, Seagate 120GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA
Drive, Windows XP SP2
Although
the comparison system is of a higher clock speed, the PR ratings
of the AMD are higher then the Intel system. I am trying to show
system efficiencies rather than brute performance as a comparison,
hopefully that comes through.
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 - Sysmark 2004 is BAPCo's latest revision of the
mainstream office productivity and Internet content creation benchmark
used to characterize the performance of the business client. It
uses a number of real-world applications and runs them through
a series of tests. We tested with the office and content creation
benchmarks.
PiFast
- 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 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.
Unreal
Tournament 2004 - run at 640x480 with minimal detail to test
CPU/Subsystem performance.
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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