BIOS

ASUS has not changed their BIOS layout for some time. Using the Award 6 BIOS core like so many others, ASUS goes with a tab menu style with the main option sets up the top and sub menus under each one. This is similar to how Intel set their own reference boards out. The A.I Tweaker menu holds all the overclocking settings which is just a new name for the old Jumperfree menu they used to use.

Buses

FSB Frequency: 200 - 800 in 1 MHz Increments

PCIE Frequency: 100 - 150 in 1MHz Increments

Voltages

CPU Voltage: 1.1v to 1.7v in 0.00625v increments

CPU PLL voltage: 1.5v to 2.78v in 0.02v increments

DRAM Voltage: 1.5v to 2.78v in 0.02v Increments

FSB Termination Voltage: 1.2v to 1.5v in 0.02v increments

Northbridge voltage: 1.5v to 2.78v in 0.02v increments

Southbridge Voltage: 1.05 to 1.2v in 0.15v increments

Clock Over Charge Voltage: 0.7v to 1.0v in 0.1v increments

As you can see ASUS gives quite a lot of choices, especially when it comes to the voltage side of things.

Overclocking

Our overclocking experience was good. Using conventional air cooling and our Dominator memory with the fan running, we managed to get the board to 558 MHz FSB with the RAM at 1:1. This at its early stage is extremely impressive for an X38 chipset and it seems to run a lot happier on DDR3 than we managed to get with DDR2.

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.