Bios Features:

     We find the standard Phoenix Award overclocking bios on the KX600S Pro. This is something most of you are familiar with, so we will just hit the highlights.

     The Main bios screen shows 6 IDE channels. 4 are good old PATA and 2 are SATA, for those spiffy new drives.  You can run any combination of drives you wish.

The Advanced tab reveals your gateway to the essential setup and overclocking tools.

Advanced Chipset Features shows the 3 basic levels of adjustment.

     Here is what we have been looking for! We found the overclocking features to be excellent. All the necessary tweaks are available. For voltages we find the the CPU Vcore goes to 2.1v, the AGP voltage goes to 1.8v and the DDR voltage goes to 2.8v. The CPU core  voltage is more than enough for almost anyone's needs. The DDR topping out at 2.8 seems a bit low until you realize that their is no AGP/PCI lock available. If you look at the screen above you will see that at a 215fsb with the 6:2:1 divider we have the AGP/PCI frequency at 71/35mhz. This may not sound so bad, except for two factors. The on-board SATA run off the PCI bus clock. I tried 220mhz (37mhz) and toasted all the data on the hard drive, requiring a fresh Windows install. Not good! Some Video cards, mostly ATI 9x00 series will not tolerate anything over the standard 66mhz AGP bus speed. Albatron is not at fault here. The AGP lock must be built into the chipset itself. I have no idea where VIA has been putting their collective heads lately, but I'm sure the sun doesn't shine there. When your competition has AGP/PCI locks, and their boards clock to a CPU's FSB limits, you'd better get with it! BAD VIA! This chipset would scream with a lock, and is still not a bad overclocker the way is stands.

     Above we hit (more like ranted) on the fact that we lack an AGP/PCI lock, and because of that, the on-board SATA and AGP card will be limiting factors for our overclocking attempts. This only affects the CPU FSB and not general CPU overclocking as you will see in the overclocking section.

     Here we have your basic DRAM controls. Nothing exciting, but we found that Albatron has the bios aggressively optimized already.

     You are given all the necessary AGP controls, including AGP Driving control. We have used this on VIA boards in the past, and it can help troubleshoot an uncooperative video card. Under  normal circumstances it is best left alone.