Jetway Kuroshio BI-100 P35 review

Written by Mартин Николов

Monday, 17 March 2008

 

Page 3 - BIOS and Overclock capabilities

In Kuroshio's BIOS we can find all the standard AWARD BIOS menus and settings. We won't look onto them at all, except for the Miscellaneous Control. There we can find a vast variety of settings, including control over processor clock ratio, system, PCI and PCI-E buses frequencies. There are also controls for memory dividers, processor voltages, chipsets, memory and the system bus.

For system bus frequency any value between 200MHz and 500MHz can be set, through 1MHz steps, and the memory divider offers the following options:

Processor voltages can be controlled within the 0.83125V - 1.59375V interval by steps of 0.0125V, which is enough for even the most precise overclock. Same goes for the memory. Here the interval varies between 1.73V and 2.74V by steps of 0.04-0.05V!

The other voltages can be controlled in the following boundaries:

NB Voltage	1.16 - 1.62V
SB Voltage	1.31 - 1.96V
Vcore 7Shift	+50mV - +350mV
FSB Voltage	1.11 - 1.52V

The motherboard also gives good control over variety of memory timings, as well as great freedom over setting them.

Viewing in detail the overclock potential that the board has, it's time to really see what it can do.

This is our test system:

• CPU: Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2140(1.6GHz, 1MB Cache, L2)
• RAM: 2x1GB SuperTalent DDR2-800Mhz 4-4-4-12 SPD
• Cooler: Coolermaster 925R (4PIN PWM)
• PSU: Fortron BlueStorm 400W
• HDD: 250GB SATA-2 16MB Cache Western Digital KS

From previous experiments i know the processor can't keep stable with frequencies over 3200мхз. But this is a combination multipliers settings, so i thought it would be enough to test the motherboard within reasonable boundaries. Unfortunately i didn't take into account that the processor is L2 revision and as you well know these are limited by the so called "FSB Wall". The wall for this one is around about 425FSB. Bur at 420 Windows loaded without a hitch and i tested with Prime 95 at 405.

This if you ask me is marvelous result for the particular board, taking into account that the processor is more likely to be the underperformer here, not the motherboard. Even more, no additional power was fed to the chipset, which might give us some more megahertz of stable FSB. Indeed it's expected that the board should work fine up to 450MHz.

Unfortunately I was unable to make a comparison tests with other boards with the same chipset.