BIOS

ECS uses an Award Bios.


On the Standard CMOS page you can change date/time, configure your harddisks and floppies.


Advanced Bios lets you change the order in which drives are tried at bootup and keyboard settings. On a subpage you find options to enable/disable certain features of your CPU.


The Advanced Chipset page has no interesting options, but on a subpage are timings options, which we will cover a bit further down.



On this page you can change disable devices like floppy, networking, onboard audio, serial port and the additional SATA controller. The subpage On-chip IDE Device lets you tweak your IDE controller.


Nothing special is to be found under Power Management and PnP/PCI Configurations.


The Hardware Monitoring page shows the essential temperatures, fan speeds and voltages. Options for dynamic fan control are not available here.

Memory Timings

The CAS latency can be configured separately from the other timings. A small bug which is not fixed yet is that the TRCD and TRP settings will always be at 4, no matter what you set in the BIOS. For our benchmarks we used SysTool to change to x-2-2-x timings to get comparable results to the other tested motherboards.


This setting lets you to disable the Dual-Channel DDR feature. It might be handy when you use completely different memory modules, which can not handle Dual Channel.