Overclocker Cafe - AOpen i945Pa-PLF Black Limited

AOpen i945Pa-PLF Black Limited

BIOS

Let's take a quickie tour around the BIOS before heading into the testing. Like almost every other motherboard I've seen lately, AOpen's i945Pa-PLF is using the Phoenix Award BIOS.

As you can see, the main BIOS screen is pretty self-explanatory and easy to navigate. Especially so if you already have experience with the Phoenix BIOS setup.

Trying to keep things to the point, we're going to skip the basics and hit the high points. The first one we get to is the memory settings under the 'Advanced Chipset Features' menu. Of course you can always set this to Auto, but where's the fun in that?

So we've set the memory to Manual, and then we set our timings under the individual menus, which also offers plenty of options in each. The System Memory Frequency offers you the choice of 'Auto' (pffft!), 533 or 667.

Our next stop on our BIOS tour is the 'Frequency/Voltage Control' menu to see what kind of options we've got for boosting our CPU.

The CPU Bus Frequency sub menu offers a pretty good range. With a ceiling of 400MHz, you're going to be hard pressed to hit it.

As for boosting the juice running through the CPU, memory and Northbridge, let's see what kinda room we've got to operate.

All three offer plenty of adjustments. If you've got the cooling, this board has some pretty decent room to maneuver.

The last thing we'll take a look at is the 'Power Master' menu. This little gem is for those of you who want a quick boost in performance when you need it and don't want to overclock the system on a regular basis.

The standard setting is 'Normal', which will run at stock settings all the time. By choosing 'Performance', the system will overclock itself as much as possible. On 'Automatic', it will automatically overclock only when you put the system under load, then ease off when there's no load. We'll have this option set to 'Normal' for our testing.

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