The AOpen motherboard offers various modes of operation: Performance, Normal, Automatic and silent. What Is unusual about Automatic and Silent is automatic alteration of the FSB bus rate during run-time, in addition to managing CPU rates. Normal runs the system within normal clock rates at all times; Performance adds dynamic overclocking to the system's capabilities as well.
When the CPU stays idle for any length of time, we observed bus rates of only 140 MHz as described earlier, which also promotes measurably cooler operation of the CPU and other chipsets on the motherboard. Silent mode boosts bus rates under heavy loads to 200 MHz as per normal specifications, but in Automatic mode bus rates can climb as high as 215 MHz (or about 7.5% overclocking). In Silent mode, however, clock rates climb only when the system experiences prolonged bursts of heavy CPU and bus usage.
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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
