The 0scar Wu BIOS revisited

Before we take a look at the bios options, I'd like to place a word about Oscar Wu once more. I know I talked about him before, on my previous DFI review, but this guy deserves an introduction, certainly if you're new to DFI. For those too young to remember, Oscar Wu was once an Abit employee, and one of the lead designers of the famous Abit NF7-S, considered one of the best motherboards of its time. After the NF7, he joined DFI for their nForce 2 AMD motherboard, which was arguably even better (and still is in the presence of some of my fellow reviewers, in working condition no less !). It might be a bold statement, but one could say that much of DFI's success can be attributed to Oscar Wu's skills. After the NF2 series he got really famous designing the nForce4 series of DFI motherboards, which are generally considered the best AMD Athlon64 motherboards ever. Oscar is especially famous for his bios tweaking skills, adding many useful features to our biosses, features we have grown very used to but were not available a few years ago. Oscar was the man that introduced GTL-ref voltages into the biosses of enthusiast motherboards not that long ago, a feature copied by all that wanted quad core CPUs to scale into higher FSB area's. Oscar will be about 30 years old, only 30 years old, and right now he has put his teeth into the bios and engineering of the first DDR3 board that DFI has launched, THIS board. How did he do? Read on to find out !

Time to have a look at the bios. As you may know, 90% of all pc systems use one out of two BIOS (Basic Input Output System) code sets, namely Phoenix Technologies Award Bios, or American Megatrends' AMI Bios. As long as I can remember, DFI has been working with Phoenix Technologies, and this board is no exception. The bios is thus an award bios, and as such the following screen is easily recognized:



In the thumbnails below the basic options are shown. I don't need to go into detail I think, as these bios screens are universal to almost every Award bios out there.



The first thumbnails above are the Standard CMOS features, the Advanced bios features and the advanced chipset features. Don't be fooled by the "advanced" word just yet though, as these are nothing special really.

Next up are the integrated peripherals:



The four lines in the above screenshot give access to the four thumbnails (click to open) you see below.



Basically explained, these options give you control over the extra features of the board that do not control cpu or memory: USB, IEEE1394, IDE, SATA and serial ports, audio, infrared, etc.


Power monitoring and others

An increasingly important screen is the one below, in which you control the power settings of the board. These settings control the fans that are plugged into the fan headers on the motherboard: they can be temperature controlled, or run at a designated speed all the time.



Very important in any enthusiast board however is the bottom half of the above screen, which monitors voltages and temperature of various important aspects : cpu temperature and voltage, memory temperature and voltage, chipset temperature and voltages, and last but not least, the PSU voltages. All of these temperatures and voltages are also combined into a nice software package in Windows by the name of "smart guardian", something that DFI has been offering for a very long time (longer than any other manufacturer, as far as I know).



The last two thumbs give an overview of the power saving functions available, and the PCI/PnP configurations, the last one being something that you shouldn't tweak unless you run into trouble with expansion cards not working properly.

So far the basic stuff, let's go to the interesting stuff now >>>