BIOS

BIOS interface

First off, we’re not big fans of the AMI BIOS interface ASUS has implemented on the P4S800D-E Deluxe. To be honest, we’ve never really like the interface, navigation just isn’t as straightforward as the tried and true Award BIOS interface used on most motherboards, settings are buried underneath submenus of the five main menus, chipset timings for the North Bridge are even underneath a second submenu! It’s bearable once you get used to it, but if you’re accustomed to Award’s interface the adjustment can be somewhat painful at first.

BIOS main menu

1061MHz FSB

Chipset configuration submenu

Complicating the matter is that ASUS’ manual doesn’t include a section with BIOS instructions. You could literally be looking for a setting for quite awhile without finding it, if it’s even there. ASUS could really ease the transition by providing instruction in the manual, but it currently just isn’t there.

What do we have is a board that is quite the capable overclocker however. Initial reviews that went out suggested that the board lacked overclocking options, so ASUS went back and added more for retail boards like we used for this review. Bus speeds range from 200-300MHz in 1MHz increments, giving you plenty of flexibility when it comes to finding the right bus speed.

Advanced submenu

Lots of voltage options

Overclocking here

It’s the voltage adjustments that really shocked us, ASUS provides CPU voltage settings up to 1.95V in increments of 0.025V, giving you lots of wiggle room for voltage. ASUS also has settings for AGP voltage up to 1.8V and DDR voltage up to 2.85V.

The memory bus settings are pretty flexible as well. Not only do you get the 200MHz, 266MHz, and 400MHz settings for those of you with 400MHz, 533MHz, and 800MHz P4 processors, the ASUS P4S800D-E Deluxe and the SiS655TX chipset also provide memory speeds of 450MHz, 500MHz, and 533MHz! If you’re new to overclocking, you can also use the AI Overclock Tuner to automatically do the work for you, overclock settings of 5% over default, 10%, 20% and 30% are available, but experienced overclockers will of course want to set everything up manually.

Over in the chipset configuration menu you can adjust the memory timings to fit the needs of your memory modules. ASUS also has a “655 Ultra Plus Mode”. We don’t know exactly what this setting does, but we guess it must be something good. Unfortunately the furthest we could get with this setting enabled and our memory timings optimized was the Windows splash screen. At that point the system would consistently lock up.

Memory multipliers

Overclocking

We weren’t quite sure how well the SiS655TX chipset would hold up to overclocking. We all know that the Intel 800MHz chipsets have proven to be reliable overclockers, but we were afraid that the SiS chipset wouldn’t be as robust, especially with the passive cooling present on the ASUS motherboard.

Fortunately, we were definitely wrong as we were able to crank our P4S800D-E Deluxe board up to 267MHz at 1.675V before we ran into stability issues. We were actually able to boot the board into Windows at even higher settings, but we couldn’t maintain adequate stability. Keep in mind that we didn’t add any exotic cooling solutions that could potentially influence our results; we used the stock Intel cooler Intel ships with its P4 processors and the passive cooler on the SiS655TX North Bridge. Pretty impressive huh?