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 lets you change general BIOS settings, you can also enable/disable several CPU features here. Unfortunately there is no setting for EIST and C1E.

Memory Timings

In Advanced Chipset Features you find options to change your memory timings settings between Manual, and By SPD.


You can change CAS Latency (tCL), Active-to-Precharge Delay (tRAS), Rad-to-Cas Delay (tRCD), and RAS Precharge Time (tRP), which are all settings the i925XE chipset offers internally. An option to disable PAT is not in the BIOS, it is always enabled, when the memory configuration supports it.

Overclocking

One cool feature is "Afterburner Mode". It will dynamically change the CPU frequency based on CPU load. Albatron should work a bit on the help text on the right tho.


The FSB is selectable between 200 and 550 MHz. I think a selection of 100 to 350 FSB would have made more sense.


The options in System Memory Speed let you select the memory divider. 400 for example means 1:1 on a 800PSB CPU. However, when running 220 FSB at the "400" setting for example, your memory is running at 440 MHz. On POST the BIOS displays the correct value.


PCI-Express bus frequencies can be selected from 100 to 150 MHz.


You can raise your DDR2 voltage by up to 0.4 Volts, which should be enough for most users. I would have preferred absolute values instead of the relative +0.xx options.


Same for the Northbridge Voltage which can be raised up to 0.3V. 0.3V extra on the Northbridge sounds like a lot to me, when it has only a passive heatsink.


CPU Core Voltage can be selected from 0.8375 (very nice for underclockers!) up to 1.9V (crazy high!).

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.


The Hardware Monitoring page shows the essential temperatures, fan speeds and voltages. More monitored voltages would have been nice.


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.