BIOS Tuning: Maximum Power

BIOS: Control Center For Enhanced Performance

Overclocking fans know where it's at: To push state-of-the-art motherboards to their limit in conjunction with the CPU and memory, a touch of manual fine-tuning to the BIOS settings is called for. It often happens that one setting or the other proves to be too "progressive", with the effect that the board does not boot up afterwards. If this happens, deleting the CMOS settings is frequently the only option available if the board does not automatically boot with the slow default values. However, most users require a fair amount of explanation to optimize the performance of their systems to the fullest. Understandably, quite a number of PC enthusiasts who deal with hardware on a daily basis tend to avoid tinkering with the BIOS settings.

Using the well-known motherboard Asus CUSL2 as an example, we will show you step by step how it is possible to speed up a relatively sluggish board with digressive settings (mostly also factory settings) by a fair amount. Our example is typical for most boards and is based on an Intel (Socket 370) or AMD platform (Socket 462). For the sake of completeness, we have also taken a look at the BIOS from the Asus P4T for the Intel Pentium 4 to briefly highlight the special features of the Rambus memory.