BIOS

Albatron uses a Phoenix AwardBios. On the Main Page, you can change your date/time settings, the HDDs and select the Floppy type.


Advanced lets you change the order in which drives are tried at bootup, also it houses several suboptions for overclocking.


Advanced BIOS has settings to adjust general BIOS settings like typematic rate and additional bootup-delays.

Memory Timings

In Advanced Chipset Features you find options to change your memory timings settings between Manual, and Auto, which uses the data from the SPD chip on your memory modules.


You can change CAS Latency (tCL), Active-to-Precharge Delay (tRAS), Rad-to-Cas Delay (tRCD), and RAS Precharge Time (tRP), which are the standard timings for memory modules, there are many many more settings to tweak in the Athlon64 memory controller, but they are not listed here.


Also on this page you will find an option to set your memory divider to change the frequency your memory is running at. There are seven different settings which should cover most situations you would like to run your memory in.

Overclocking

The Frequency/Voltage control page is home to the overclocking options in this BIOS. You can increase the CPU FSB up to 400 MHz. It is nice that the greyed fields are automatically updated when you change the values, so you won't have to do the math yourself.
The Athlon64 connects chipset and CPU via the HTT, which runs at a multiple of the FSB. Once you start overclocking your CPU a lot, you should drop that divider, so that the HTT runs in spec and does not limit your clocks, increasing HTT does not increase performance since the bus will never be saturated, even at the default speed.


Unlike Intel CPUs, AMDs processors have a selectable multiplier (only downwards). This allows you to boost your performance even more, if your memory can handle the speeds. The available options here are fine, some boards offer half multipliers, but they are usually not needed.


PCI-Express bus frequencies can be selected from 100 to 145 MHz.


You can raise your DDR voltage up to 3.0V, which is ok for most users, but the more extreme people would sure like to see more. Usually the DDR voltage is generated from the 3.3V supply, so options up to at least 3.3V should be no problem at all.


The Chipset Voltage can be set from 1.5V to 1.8V which is a good range. Everything higher than 1.8V puts your Chipset at serious risk.


CPU VCore options are rather limited. You can select from default, +5%, +10% and +15%. I prefer absolute values. On the other hand relative values are good for less experienced users, +10% is a good value for most users who don't care too much about knowing details. More (=smaller) steps would have been nice here.

Integrated Peripherals

Integrated Peripherals has options to change, how the SATA ports appear to the system and to enable/disable USB, Audio, LAN, Floppy and configure the Serial Port.


Nothing special is to be found under Power Management, except for an option to enable AMD Cool&Quiet which reduces heat output and power consumption when the CPU is idle.


The Hardware Monitoring page shows the essential temperatures, CPU fan speed and the usually monitored voltages. Options to dynamically change fan speeds based on temperature are not available.


One nice feature is, that you can copy your BIOS settings from CMOS into the BIOS ROM. The setting in ROM is not erased when a CMOS reset is performed, or when the battery is removed.