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Written by Dusan Srbljak
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Monday, 24 December 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3 Formula's BIOS is absolutely a separate story, and will thus be treated as such – separately. It is signed by AMI, as we are already accustomed to. Its appearance does not differ much from any other ASUS' BIOS. Besides the standard settings found on any modern board, ASUS grouped all possible overclocking options under the “Extreme Tweaker” section. Expectedly, the CPU FSB can be set as high as 800 MHz.
There are seven memory dividers, providing fine tweaking possibilities for the CPUtoFSB ratio. Although some would argue that 1.9 V is not enough CPU voltage, we remind them that this motherboard doesn't actually need voltages as high as others. The real quality of Formula's BIOS is the number of steps in voltage settings. For example, there are 15 steps just in between 1.5 V and 1.6 V. RAM voltage goes as incredibly high as 3.4 V. The maximum Northbridge voltage is 2 V.
To sum it all up, Formula's BIOS is not something that will be a limit to your overclocking. There are loads and loads of options, timings, subtimings etc. The most important thing, perhaps, is that they are all very functional, and not “just there”.
Intel chipsets have always had a major flaw as far as CrossFire is concerned – the way PCI-E slots function in that mode. If you possess for example a couple of 2900XT cards and wish to make a CrossFire system. The first PCI-E slot will be working in PCI-E 16x mode, whereas the other one will be working in just the PCI-E 4x mode. This basically means that you wouldn't be able to use the potential of the cards to the max (there will be a bottleneck), resulting in smaller framerates.
As the graphics card never requires the bandwidth available in 16x mode (at least not the present models), the people at ASUS decided to make an intelligent move by themselves. They decided to use the Crosslink chip to divide the PCI-E lines into two separate 8x slots, so Formula will enable you to use you graphics cards 100% and provide you with the performance you paid for to start with. Naturally, should you use a single card in your system, it will have all 16x bandwidth at disposal.
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