BIOS

BIOS Implementation

Unfortunately the K7S5A's BIOS isn't as tweakable as say an ABIT or an Iwill implementation, much less an ASUS or even Gigabyte! In fact, the initial BIOS release (which was used for performance tests) didn't offer any bus speed adjustments besides the defaults. ECS recently released a newer BIOS with bus speeds of 100, 112,124, 133, 138, 150, and 166MHz but this is still a far cry from the top BIOS's of even three years ago, much less 2001.

BIOS Main Menu

CPU setup menu

In addition, no settings are available for clock multiplier adjustment or CPU core voltage, so you're essentially left crossing your fingers that your CPU will work unless you choose to modify your L1 bridges for multiplier adjustment, something we didn't do and we doubt you will either -- AMD chips are so cheap right now it just isn't worth the time. This pretty much leaves the memory timings under the "Advanced Setup" menu as the only area where end users can really tweak the performance of their system. We used the Ultra settings with a CAS latency of "2" for our tests.

Advanced setup menu

Power management menu

Other than that, all of your standard settings are present in BIOS. And yes, before you ask, this motherboard will support AMD's upcoming Palomino and Morgan cores. One peculiar little quirk we did run into was the performance of the latest BIOS. While the BIOS revision that came with our board was an incredible performer, for some odd reason we could never get the latest BIOS ECS provided us with to run as fast. Since the only addition the new BIOS adds is the new bus speeds, we recommend sticking with the initial BIOS release.

Standard CMOS setup menu

Features setup menu