BIOS

The 7NJS’ features the now familiar Phoenix Technology’s Award BIOS. The BIOS has all the adjustments and tweaks that overclockers have come to expect from a motherboard of this caliber. In this section we will not bore you with the obligatory BIOS screen shots, but will instead focus on a few of the distinct features.

The PC health section provides all the information at a glance that most users require, e.g. system and CPU temperatures, fan speed, and voltages. System shut down temperatures can be set to any value up to 100 degrees C.

The advance chipset section has all the features an enthusiast could require. Adjustments for CPU interface, and CPU multiplier are found here. The memory settings are very tweakable with adjustments for memory dividers and timing provided. The one negative we found here is that FSB settings are capped at 200. Very aggressive overclockers who have exceptional cooling and memory modules typically exceed 200 FSB speeds with ease. In our own tests, using a very conservative test bench FSB speeds of 195 were achieved with no difficulty. We hope that Chaintech will address this limitation in a future BIOS revision.

The voltage adjustments available in the 7NJS’ BIOS provide the extreme and hardcore overclocker with many options. Vcore settings can be adjusted all the way to 2.15V in .025V increments. AGP voltages can be manipulated up to a maximum of 2.0V. The most impressive voltage adjustments of all are related to VDimm. Here the rabid (maybe insane) enthusiast can fry their memory modules with voltage settings that top out at 3.2V!

One quick note here; Chaintech claims that the PCI is locked at 33Mhz. There are no settings that allow the user to adjust PCI speeds; therefore we were not able to independently verify this claim.
 

Overclocking

Our overclocking goals for the 7NJS consisted of achieving the maximum STABLE FSB speed, while running our memory at the most aggressive settings possible.

Maximum FSB speeds are best achieved when multipliers can be manipulated.  Normally users have to unlock their CPU in order to achieve this functionality; however Chaintech has provided a feature in their BIOS which allows access to multiplier manipulation. To access this feature one needs to flash the BIOS to the latest revision; 7njs0b 18. For those who need this latest BIOS, it can be downloaded at the following link: http://www.chaintech.com.tw/Downloads/MBBIOS.htm

Using the test configuration from the table below, we proceeded to employ different combinations of multiplier/FSB/voltages/memory settings until we were able to accomplish our goal.

Our results were as follows:

• Multiplier         11
• FSB                195
• Memory          2-2-2-7
• Vcore              1.85V
• Vdimm            2.8V
• VAGP             1.6V

Test Configuration

Next: Performance & Conclusion