BIOS

Now we get down to where the nitty gritty is, the BIOS. Award version 6 is the BIOS of choice that EPoX uses for its boards, and it hasn't changed for the Optimus. The Overclocking features are located under the Power BIOS Features Section as well as the Advanced chipset features.

Under the Power BIOS Features menu are the major features for the overclocking, advanced chipset features contains the Hyper Transport divider controls.

Frequencies

CPU Frequency: 100MHz to 500MHz in 0.02MHz increments

PCI Express Bus (NB): 100MHz to 200MHz in 1MHz increments or Hyperclock GPU

PCI Express Bus (SB): 100MHz to 200MHz in 1MHz increments or Hyperclock GPU

Real Time Turbo Mode: +0MHz to +31Mhz in +1MHz increments

CPU Clock Ratio: x4 to CPU Max Supported in +x1 increments

Voltages

CPU Voltage: -0.2v to +0.35v in 0.025v increments

NB Voltage: 1.2v to 1.55v in 0.025v increments

SB voltage: 1.5v to 1.85v in 0.025v increments

NB/SB HT Voltage: 1.3v to 1.5v in 0.025v increments

DIMM voltage: 1.8v to 2.5v in 0.025v increments

VTT Voltage: 1.2v to 1.55v in 0.025v increments

1.5VSB Voltage: 1.5v to 1.8v in 0.1v increments

Overclocking

The overclocking of the Optimus was quite impressive.

We managed to get it to 364MHz FSB with a multiplier of 6x (2184MHz), with CPU voltage at 1.35v, Northbridge voltage at 1.45v, Southbridge voltage at 1.7v, DIMM voltage at 2.2v, VTT at 1.55v and the Hyper Transport link speed at 3x.

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 don't 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.