The BIOS is the standard AWARD layout, you can see that the BIOS contains most of the same main sections as other motherboards do. There is a big difference though, what’s inside of these categories is much greater than most motherboards. The standard and advanced features sections have the general boot, time, and other things which are not of very much importance.
The Advanced Chipset Features menu has 3 submenus and 2 options, the first submenu is DRAM Clock/Drive control, this menu is where you will do all of your memory tweaking. The AGP & P2P Bridge Control contains options for your video card settings. The CPU and PCI Bus Control menu is where you will select the options for your PCI and bus options.
The DRAM Clock/Drive Control menu is extraordinary! There are so many memory-tweaking options that they would not fit on my screen at without having to scroll down. The DRAM clock setting can be 133 and 166 which will determine the speed of your DDR. You can then choose what kind of settings you want, I have all of the memory options settings at the most aggressive and fastest. My RAM was set to 2-2-2 CMD 1 with 4 way bank interleaving. The AGP & P2P Bridge Control menu is also good with all of the options that you will need for your video card, I have My AGP Aperture set to 128Mb, my AGP mode to 4x, and AGP fast write enabled along with AGP Master 1 WS Write/Read.
The Integrated Peripherals menu is where you can change all the settings for most of the onboard things such as the IDE, floppy, sound, modem and so on. You can enable and disable a lot of the USB options here as well as what you want the initial display device to be. The Onboard PCI Device menu is where you will enable/disable your onboard audio. The Power Management Setup section is where all the ACPI, power saving, and sleep options are.
The PNP/PCI Configurations section is just that, you can choose some of your PNP and PCI options here. You can select IRQ settings and set whether your OS is plug and play compatible. The PC Health Status menu is where you can see temperatures, fan RPM, and voltages of your system. You also have some options, you can have your system warn or shut itself down if the CPU gets too hot, which is a very good idea otherwise you could fry it. You can also enable and disable the PC Health in the POST, I prefer to keep this on just to make sure everything is good while POSTing.
The Frequency/Voltage Control section is also very good, the EPoX 8K3A+ does all multiplier, voltage, and FSB settings via the BIOS. With no jumpers or DIP switches overclocking is much easier and less time consuming because you can do it all without opening up your case.
The multiplier setting in the BIOS goes up to 15 in .5 increments so with an unlocked CPU you can drop it to achieve a higher FSB or higher it to keep the same FSB while still overclocking the CPU. The FSB (Front Side Bus) is changed in the BIOS in 1Mhz increments which can be easily entered into the red box by typing whatever setting you like up to 255.
