BIOS Overclocking

The Genie BIOS Settings page is home to all frequency and voltage tweaking settings, and there are a lot of them.


The FSB is selectable between 200 and 550 MHz. In our testing the chipset reached 450 MHz, with a mere 0.2V increase on the chipset. With a good board 500 MHz sounds well in reach.


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. This is what the LDT/FSB ratio setting is used for.

On the CPU multiplier option menu you can select half multipliers, all the way down to x4.0.

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


VID control sets the CPU voltage after POST, the available options are very fine-granular, going in 0.025V steps from 0.8V to 1.55V. If 1.55V is not enough for you, no problem, DFI has added a "special control" setting. This allows you to increase CPU voltage even more. For example if you run at 1.55V and select "Above VID 110%" here, your CPU will run at 1.55V * 1.10 = 1.705V.


The LDT voltage can be selected from 1.20V to 1.50V which seems to be a good range.


The old LanParty NF4 boards allowed up to 1.8V for chipset voltage, which wasn't enough for some people, so DFI increased this range to 1.96V.


Another relict of the past is the 4V jumper - if you wanted more than 3.3V you had to move a jumper on the motherboard to allow selection of up to 4.0V. With the new Expert boards this is no longer required. You just select a value between 2.29V and 4.00V and the board handles the rest. The step size has been reduced here too.


A very useful feature is the integrated MemTest86+. If you enable the "Run MemTest86+" option, the system will not boot from disk, but execute a version of MemTest from the BIOS. This allows you to check system stability very quick, without experiencing long boot-up delays.


Now that the SLI-jumpers are gone from the PCI-E slot area, you have to use this setting to switch the number of active lanes when running in SLI mode.

On the overclocking page you can also tweak certain LAN chip settings and disable the second Ethernet interface and the IEEE1394 chip. I think these options should go elsewhere, for example Integrated Peripherals.

CMOS Reloaded

Another extremely useful feature in the BIOS is the CMOS Reloaded page. You can save all BIOS settings to one of four banks, which can be loaded again later. Another way to load a certain bank is to define a hotkey which has to be pressed during system startup.

The settings here are saved to the BIOS chip's flash memory, so they are not lost if you perform a CMOS reset or remove the battery.


When you press Escape during POST the system will present you with a boot menu where you can pick the startup device. This is very useful, you can set your first startup device to HDD in the BIOS, and the rest to disabled (faster startup times). On the rare occasion when you have to boot from CD or USB stick, just use this boot menu.