BIOS

This is the BIOS that most of us are used to seeing.  Most of these options are fairly standard,  However there are some that you may not be familiar with.  We'll talk about those in a minute.

Here we have the Genie overclocking options.  This is where most of us will spend the majority of our time.  Let's just start at the top.  The Easy Overclocking let's you overclock in %'s.  If you aren't too familiar with overclocking, you may want to give this a shot first.  The CPU ratio is fixed on most Intel CPU's.  Engineering samples are unlocked, but with some new Intel Chipset boards the 3.4 and 3.6 Pentium 4's can be changed to a multiplier of 14x.  Too bad DFI couldn't figure out a way to make that work on this board.  Lowering the multiplier to 14x would allow you to really get a good front side bus overclock.  The FSB on this board can be manually set all the way up to 400MHz, that's more than most of us will ever use.  Skipping down to the voltages and the thumbnails above, we have the CPU Voltage.  DFI again gives you more than you need here too.  The Prescott has a default voltage of around 1.4V.  DFI gives you settings all the way up to 1.9750V.  I don't think I would even go that high with LN2 cooling.  Dimm Voltage is next.  Most boards seem to be lacking in this area and the boards that have the high memory voltages seem to have problems with them.  The LANParty allows you to set the maximum memory voltage to 3.2v.  You won't be needing a memory voltage mod here.  The AGP voltage has settings all the way up to 1.8v.  Just looking at this section of the BIOS you can tell this board was built with overclocking in mind.

The other important overclocking area is the memory settings.  A high CPU overclock is great, but if you can tighten the memory timings up, you will see a lot of improvement.

You're going to need to keep an eye on all of your vitals and the PC Health tab is where you'll find them.

Here's a feature that I really like on this board.  It's called CMOS reloaded and that's exactly what it is.  You can save your custom BIOS settings in here and reload them anytime you want.  You can save up to 4 different files here.  The thing that irritates me the most about overclocking is going just a little too high and locking up.  Then you can't start your computer again without clearing the CMOS.  Once you clear the CMOS, you're going to have to go back into the BIOS and change all your settings back to the way the were.  With CMOS Reloaded you can save your BIOS settings the way you like them and reload them when this happens.  You can give a custom description to each one so you know exactly what they are.