BIOS

Sapphire uses an Award BIOS.


The first page lets you change HDD settings and floppy disk drives - if you still have them.


Advanced BIOS has a number of useful options like for example change startup drives or to remove the full-screen boot logo.


On Advanced Chipset you can tweak a large number of RS690 related settings.


What stood out most is the GFX Async Clock Mode which lets you change the GPU clock of the RS690's integrated VGA chipset. Based on the numbers here the BIOS says that the GPU runs at 200 MHz default, in our testing ATITool said 400 MHz default, ATITool is probably wrong. Anyway, our maximum overclock was 525 MHz ( = 262.5 MHz BIOS). This means that the range up to 350 MHz should be plenty, even with increased chipset voltage.


All standard stuff on the pages Peripherals, Onchip IDE, Onchip PCI and Power Management.


The monitoring page has a setting for fan control which gives you precise control over the CPU fan speed. You can set the exact temperature at which the CPU fan starts spinning and set at which rate it accelerates when temperatures rise.