BIOS Setup

BIOS Layout

The BIOS of the P4B266 sports the same familiar interface we're used to seeing from ASUS motherboards. While it's a bit unusual if you've spent lots of time with motherboards utilizing the Award interface, the interface used on the ASUS boards is just as effective, although it has a larger amount of submenus.

Clock speeds up to 2.3GHz!

200MHz bus!

For overclocking, bus speeds from 100-200MHz are available in 1MHz increments, making the P4B266 a robust platform for the overclocking crowd. CPU voltage can also be adjusted up to 1.85V, although the memory voltage can only be adjusted via jumpers. As you can see in our pictures the P4B266 already contains settings for processors up to 2.3GHz and the processor multiplier can be adjusted if you happen to get your hands on an unlocked Pentium 4 processor. Like all of ASUS' newer motherboards, a BIOS safe mode is present on the P4B266 that essentially runs the system at its slowest parameters in the event that you just attempted to overclock your processor and the settings were too high. This is a very important feature to have since the P4B266 doesn't have a jumper for clearing CMOS.

BIOS Main Menu

Chip Configuration Menu

Besides the memory timings, one particular setting end users should play with is the "optimization mode" setting. When set to "turbo" we noticed a nice performance increase.

Overclocking

When overclocking our P4B266 we used an unlocked Willamette 2.0GHz Pentium 4 processor. With the clock multiplier set to 12.0, we were able to successfully run the P4B266 at up to 178MHz with no problems. With the Pentium 4's quad-pumped bus, that's effectively 712MHz FSB folks!

Notice the floppy connector