Although the board itself appears to be complete and
ready to ship, the BIOS side of the equation is a bit iffy. Memory bus tweaks,
an absolute necessity for a VIA Apollo Pro, are basically nonexistent. You have
the usual NORMAL/FAST/TURBO settings in the BIOS, and CAS settings, and that's
basically it. No options to run the memory async of the host clock, no
interleaving, nada. I flashed the board with a provided BIOS, upon contacting
DFI, but it was the same BIOS revision that shipped with the board (date 09-28)
so no improvements to be seen yet. Take a look here.
Hmm...This looks promising! Frequency and voltage
adjustments in the BIOS, yummy. Well, at least you'd think so.......Take a
glance inside.
Once in this settings screen, you are greeted with
practically nothing....No core voltage tweaks to speak of, an amazingly dull
selection of FSB tweaks, and NO voltage tweaks. Guess they need to rename this
screen ya think? I assume, since the board does support 133FSB processors, that
the frequency ranges change to accommodate them, and they're probably just as
meager. I tested the system with a 100FSB P3-700E. There is no jumper or BIOS
setting to "force" the board to see it as a 133 processor to tell whether or not
the above is the case. If you are planning on overclocking the CPU you place in
this board, you are basically out of luck, and need to look elsewhere.
But hey! There are actually a few of you left out there
(I think) that don't overclock and/or tweak your systems. Plus there are many
that are just looking for an inexpensive board to build a 2nd PC out of. Is this
board for you? Performance is a concern, whether you are overclocking or not, so
it's on to the benchmarks!