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BIOS and Overclocking

The BIOS

The ASUS P6T SE uses a modified version of the American Megatrends BIOS. It’s easy to navigate through using the tabbed sections and also relatively easy to understand.

The most important section of the BIOS for any Overclocker or gamer wanting to milk more performance out of their system is the ‘Ai Tweaker’ page. At the top of this page you’re able to adjust DRAM and CPU frequencies.

Towards the bottom of the page you can adjust voltages and play with more advanced features of the board. One thing which really annoys me is some of the wording in the BIOS. For example, ‘QPI/DRAM Core Voltage’ could easily be confused with DRAM Bus Voltage.

The DRAM timings section is linked on the ‘Ai Tweaker’ page. In this section, the main timings most people will adjust can be found towards the top. However, there are many more parts which can also be played with for more advanced users.

On the ‘Advance CPU Settings’ screen, the top shows the calculated CPU clock speed along with the BCLK which has been used. Nearer to the bottom of the page, you’re able to disable or enable features that your CPU entails.

One feature of the board I found really useful was the O.C Configuration page. Here you’re able to save BIOS profiles and reload them. This was particularly useful when overclocking my i7 920 because I could quickly reload the BIOS settings used before after an unsuccessful overclock.

The Hardware Monitor section allows you to set profiles for each fan installed on the motherboard. The profiles consist of Standard, Turbo and Silent.

Overclocking

I overclocked my i7 920 to 4 GHz. However, given that I was cooling it with an air cooler, the temperatures were loading at just over 75 degrees. Because of this, I lowered the overclock to a more sensible 3.8 GHz. This was achieved with a BCLK of 181, a multiplier of 21 (turbo boost enabled) and a CPU voltage of 1.2v.

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