PART 3 – BIOS To continue my review further, here is an in depth look at the BIOS for the Asus P5E3 Deluxe – part 3

I had a lengthy debate with myself over how in depth I should make this section, so rather than bore you with photos and descriptions of mundane parts of the BIOS I decided to stick to the interesting parts of the BIOS and hopefully give some explaination to the less well understood sections.

You can reach the Asus P5E3 Deluxe BIOS by pressing ‘Del’ when the ASUS splash screen is displayed on startup.

Initial BIOS Page
What I consider to be standard BIOS features are those that you will find in all levels of motherboard, which are required for the user to be able to setup a PC. This doesn’t include overclocking, voltage control, fan control etc.

As you can see the initial BIOS screen is your usual affair. From here you can set the time and date, configue the settings for your SATA drives including AHCI if used, see basic system information and enable or disable a ‘legacy’ floppy disk drive. It’s nice to see that the floppy is finally considered ‘legacy’, lets hope IDE soon follows. The other useful function on this screen is the ability to change the language of the BIOS which is useless to me as english is the only language I’m fluent in but I’m sure it could be useful to others. My only concern is the quality of the translation as even some of the english isn’t the best.

The BIOS has seven top level menus these are ‘main’, ‘AI Tweaker’, ‘Advanced’, ‘Power’, ‘Boot’, ‘Tools’ and ‘Exit’. Main is the starting screen, AI Tweaker is the overclocking section and Advanced offer a further 5 menus for CPU config, chipset config, onboard devices config, USB config and PCIPnP. Power allows you to set the suspend mode, auto power on options and fan speed control, it is here that you’ll also find the hardware monitor. The boot menu covers boot logo, boot device priority and boot security passwords, the Tools menu gives you access to the additional BIOS programs and Exit allows you to exit and save changes or not.

AI Tweaker

The AI Tweaker section will be frequented often by anyone interested in overclocking with this motherboard. The first option allows you to set the AI overclock tuner to auto, manual or XMP. Manual allows you to have access to the FSB clock speed and the FSB strap, XMP is only an option if you have XMP (eXtreme Memory Profile) memory and activates an automated overclock and as usual the auto setting sets all the defaults. The rest of this section offers you as much control as you could possibly want for your overclocking. You can change the cpu multiplier, the fsb to northbridge strap, the fsb frequency and the PCIE frequency.

You then get a huge number of memory settings, first off is the DRAM frequency, followed by the command rate and then all the timing control settings. Fortunately the memory timings are split into two sections primary and secondary and the current settings are shown alongside in grey this helps when wading through the 15 timings. I’ve only ever changed the first 4 settings which are CAS latency, RAS to CAS delay, RAS precharge and RAS active time, these are the four settings that are stated on memory when purchased. It’s nice to have all the others available but I cannot see them being used by many people and the benefits gained from changing them must be extremely small.

Following on from the memory timings are some additional memory options. DRAM static read control and DRAM dynamic write control can be enabled or disabled. Then there is a setting called AI clock twister which can be manually set to light, moderate or strong with strong giving the best performance. Following the clock twister are the clock skew options for DRAM channels A and B which allows advancing or delaying by up to 350ps. Finally in the memory section we have the AI transaction booster which once enabled can be set to boost 1-8 and when disabled can be set to relax 1-8, I’ve found ‘enabled boost 3′ to give a decent performance boost while remaining stable.

The next section of the AI Tweaker menu covers the voltages that you’ll need to push that overclock while remaining stable. This section requires the earlier ‘AI overclock tuner’ to have been set to manual or XMP to be visble and gives you access to voltages for CPU (1.7V max/0.00625V interval), CPU PLL (2.78V max/0.02V interval), FSB termination (1.5V max/0.02V interval), DRAM (2.78V max/0.02V interval), Northbridge (1.91V max/0.02V interval), Southbridge (1.2V max/0.15V interval) and clock over-charging (1.0V max/0.1V interval). These voltage settings should provide enough options for all but the most extreme overclocker.

The final section of the AI Tweaker menu allows setting the ‘load level calibration’ which stabilises the CPU voltage when enabled, the CPU and NB GTL voltage references and the CPU and PCIE spread spectrum.

Advanced
As mentioned the advanced menu covers CPU config, chipset config, onboard devices config, USB config and PCIPnP.

The important parts of the CPU config page for most people are the C1E support and the Intel Speedstep tech. You can enable or disable these from here, most overclockers will disable these, at least while finding their stable overclock as these control the operating systems ability to cut back the cpu and cpu voltage while idle. The theory being that having these set whilst overclocking can cause instability. However after settling on an overclock I always turn these back on and re-test for stability as they do bring real benefits in terms of power comsumption and reduced heat generation. The CPU multiplier is also accessable from this page although as it’s in the AI Tweaker page too I guess it won’t be used here much.

Chipset configuration sounds exciting but actually only offers you the ability to set the default display adapter between PCI and PCIE, force the PCIE to x1 and to remap the overlapped PCI memory when using a 64bit OS.

The Onboard Devices Configuration however is a useful place to visit as it allows you to turn off devices that you know you won’t be needing, this helps speed up boot times and avoid conficts and it should reduce power consumption slightly too.  I’ve disabled the eSATA/PATA controller as my drives are all SATA , one of the LAN controllers, the firewire controller and the serial port controller.

There really isn’t much to do in USB Configuration unless you are using a much older or unusual operating system. Or unless you want to turn off USB completely, which probably wouldn’t be sensible considering that’s where your mouse will have to connect.

The final advanced section is PCIPnP and this just allows you to toggle between YES and NO, where YES allows the operating system to configure devices and NO forces the BIOS to configure devices. In most cases you’ll see no noticable difference between the two.

Advanced
We’re nearing the end now and we come onto the Power menu.  Here we can set the suspend mode, the options are S1 or S3. Where S3 is a more complete power down but may be less device compatible and S1 is more compatible but has a greater power drain.  You can also choose to repost your video on S3 resume, I choose to do this as it doesn’t add much to the re-start time and avoids graphical glitches on restart.

The APM configuration sub-menu allows you to set the device power on options these are power on by: RTC Alarm, External Modems, PCI Devices, PCIE Devices and PS/2 Keyboard. Also in this menu you can define what should happen on the event of power loss. Then at the bottom of the APM sub menu we find ‘Energy Star 4.0c Support’ which when enabled allows the motherboard to pass the Energy Star 4.0c rating, however I found that with both the BIOS supplied and v1001 which I currently use, I can’t get the PC to enter suspend mode with this enabled, which seems a little back to front. I guess this is a glitch or maybe an incompatiblity with a component that I use. What it does is appears to go into suspend but just at the point where it turns the fans off it suddenly jumps back into life and comes immediately back out of suspend mode.

The other sub menu under ‘Power’ is the ‘Hardware Monitor’. This displays real time temperatures for CPU and Motherboard and fan speeds for CPU and chassis fans 1,2,3 and 4. You also get motherboard voltages for CPU, 3.3V, 5V and 12V. You can select to ignore any of these readings too, in which case they read back as ‘ignored’.

At the bottom of the hardware monitor sub menu you’ll find the motherboard fan controls (ASUS Q-Fan2). The ASUS fan control is a feature that I really like, especially on this motherboard. One some of the cheaper ASUS boards the Q-Fan is only active on the CPU fan and 1st system fan headers, whereas on this board it’s active on the CPU fan and all 4 system fan headers. For the CPU fan you can choose 1 of three pre-set profiles, silent, optimal or performance and for the system fans you can choose the motherboard target temperature and the minimum fan speed as a percentage.

The CPU fan settings all ramp the fan up to maximum at high temperatures but they have different fan speeds at cooler temperatures. Obviously the cooling ability and noise is still dependant on the fan that you have fitted but through the use of PWM control the fan can be much quieter at lower temperatures. I use the silent mode because it still ramps up at higher temperatures to provide sufficient cooling but it keeps my 2000rpm 120mm fan quiet when the PC is idle. The system fans have a percentage setting for the low end (i.e. when PC is idle) which ranges from 60% upwards in +10% increments. This is important as this is controlling 3 pin fan headers and so uses varying voltages to control the fans rather than PWM and some fans won’t run at all when the voltage is too low. I found that my Akasa Amber 120mm fan wouldn’t run at 60% but my Hiper and Coolermaster 120mm fans will. The target temperature setting allows you to set a value from 26C to 44C in 3C increments.

Boot
In the Boot menu we find three sections, boot device priority which is quite straight forward but still an inportant section. Booting from a bootable USB device is possible. Then we also have the ‘Boot Settings Configuration’ which allows us to enable quick boot and the full screen logo. We can also set from here whether to bootup with number lock on, wait for F1 on an error and display ‘Press DEL to enter setup’ during POST (Power On Self Test). The final section of the boot menu is the security settings where you can set passwords for a supervisor and a user so that you can protect your PC from unauthorised access. You can also choose different levels of BIOS access for the user level.

Tools and Exit
Finally we have the Tools menu and the Exit menu. I will cover the Tools menu on it’s own page as the next installment. The Exit menu is very self explanatory and allows you to ‘Exit and Save Changes’, ‘Exit and Discard Changes’, ‘Discard Changes’ and ‘Load Setup Defaults’.

All in all, quite a comprehensive BIOS without any glaring ommisions. Some extreme overclockers might want more voltage options or want the voltages to go higher but they normally volt mod boards for this purpose anyway or buy even more expensive boards.

So that’s another part of my ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard review complete, I hope you’re enjoying reading it and please keep reading – ASUS P5E3 Deluxe Motherboard Review Part 4

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