Now its onto the BIOS of the Bad Axe 2. Those who use ASUS boards will know just how to navigate the BIOS of the Intel Bad Axe 2.
While Intel boards in the past have been very lacking when it comes to overclocking features, it seems Intel finally have caught onto the fact that overclocking sells to the enthusiasts, and if Intel wants a piece of this sector their boards are going to have to change.
Intel places its overclocking settings under the Performance Menu in the BIOS. You are able to adjust all aspects of overclocking here.
First off is the CPU voltage Override which in plain English is for the CPU voltage. You can go as low at 1.1v or up to 1.6v in 0.025v increments. Enhance power apparently allows you to give the CPU a little extra juice to keep it stable, however, during testings it made no difference.
Front Side Bus voltage override gives extra power to the FSB the system uses, this goes from 1.20v to a max of 1.5v in 0.025v increments.
For Core 2 Extreme owners you can adjust the Processor Multiplier Override from 6x to a max of 20x. For Core 2 Duo owners, you cannot adjust your multiplier to anything other than 6x or the default your CPU uses.
Lastly is the FSB Frequency Override. Intel has finally given up on a percentage increase system and gone to raw MHz. You can go as low at 200MHz and all the way to 433MHz in 1MHz increments.
Lastly is the DDR-2 Voltage which you can adjust from 1.8v to a max of 2.8v in 0.04v increments.
Using all the available settings we maxed the boards 433MHz FSB (7 x 433MHz FSB = 3031MHz) out without any problems. DDR-2 was at 2.2v, MCH voltage at 1.6v, FSB at 1.3v and CPU at 1.4v Overall it is a great result and though it doesnt have as much range as other boards out there, no other board can say they max out their FSB range.
Important Editor Note: Our maximum overclocking result is the best result we managed in our limited time testing the motherboard. Due to time constraints we dont have enough time to tweak the motherboard to the maximum and find the highest possible FSB as this could take days to properly find. We do however spend at least a few hours overclocking every motherboard to try and find the highest possible overclock in that time frame. You may or may not be able to overclock higher if you spend more time tweaking or as new BIOS updates are released or burn in time might come into play if you believe in that.
