EPoX EP-9U1697-GLi Motherboard Review - Taking a look in the BIOS
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Well, a BIOS is a BIOS for the most part. Within the organized blue screens of the BIOS configuration, you set up such things as the time and date, the boot order of your drives, and such mundane things as have been available forever. EPoX has a history of making motherboards that are relatively easy to tweak and overclock, and this board is definitely no exception.
Above is a pic of the advanced chipset features of the bios. It has options to configure the motherboards memory, PCI-e capabilities, power consumption, and HTT. Let’s delve in a little deeper.
As you can see, there is quite a fair amount of configuration you can accomplish with this board. I could go on all day showing pictures of the BIOS and all the configurations you can make, but lets cut to the chase and see what we can do with this board. Here’s our test configuration:
- EPoX 9U1697 Motherboard (obviously)
- AMD 64 3700+ San Diego
- 2 GB Patriot Dual-Channel memory
- Sapphire X800 GTO 128 MB
I started by tweaking the FSB speed from 200 MHz up, until I encountered my first bit of system instability. This occurred at 245 MHz. The clock multiplier was set to 11x (which is stock) which put me at about 2.7 GHz, which is a bit above the stock 2.2 GHz. By increasing the core voltage by .05v, the system stabilized and I tried to move a little higher. I was able to get the FSB up to 255 MHz (also needed to increase the core voltage another .05v up to a total of 1.5v). This brought me to approximately 2.8 GHz. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the system to move above the 255 MHz threshold.
Please note, that I was doing this overclocking using only a stock fan and heatsink. I definitely could have gotten better numbers if I had used a more robust cooling solution.
So now let’s go on to the benchmarks. I ran the same tests on my original Biostar board, and then twice on the EPoX, at stock settings (2.2ghz) and then overclocked (2.8ghz).
I ran the following benchmarks:
- SiSoft Sandra 2005
- Super Pi
- FEAR
Next: Benchmark results >>
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