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 450 MHz. 450 might sound like a lot, but there are people who can actually run that fast. In our testing the chipset would not go above 365 MHz, but you have to consider that we had the Ultra version of the chipset. NVIDIA is probably binning their chips, so chips which can run faster will become SLI versions.


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. By changing the option LDT Bus transfer width you can change the number of lines the LDT bus uses.


Unlike Intel CPUs, AMD's 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 great, even half multipliers are listed, even though they might not work as expected.


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


By raising your CPU core voltage you can get some extra overclocking headroom out of your processor. The option VID Startup defines the voltage at which the CPU is run during first initialization stages, some boards don't offer this setting and run the CPU at its default during POST, but at the high FSB setting from the BIOS, so the CPU might not boot up.


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.


So is the Chipset voltage setting. Up to 1.8V seems to be fine for everybody, especially if you consider that some people killed both chipset and CPU by voltmodding their chipset voltage too high.


To overclock your memory some more, you have to increase the memory voltage. The DFI LanParty is one of the few boards offering voltages of more than 3.3V. To enable these higher voltages you have to move a jumper on the motherboard from 3.3V to 4V. After doing this, your memory options will go up to 4.0V in 0.1V steps. Please note that when running in 4V mode, the memory voltage MOSFET will get very hot. There is also a setting for even more memory voltage, if you enable this it will increase all memory voltage by 0.3, if the current setting is not 3.2V.


A revolutionary new BIOS 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.

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.