The BIOS is easy to navigate through and has very adequate features for the overclockers that are very straightforward and simple to alter to your taste. NVIDIA has put a lot of effort into their BIOS functions and it shows. Many times clocking a system beyond, the normal parameters while attempting an extreme or even simple overclock makes the system unbootable causing you to reset the BIOS to its natural state. On the SLI Intel Edition board however even with extreme overclocking that usually resulted in a no post, it still posted most of the time. There were times when the system would not boot into the Windows environment, but it still posted to the BIOS in most instances allowing you to clock the system back down to a more moderate level that could then post into the OS. It did a few times not instantly post when I had the system way past spec, but after a few tries it posted again. The CMOS reset button is located between the two SLI cards so getting to it meant removing the cards a not so favorable task. I did have to do this a few times, but less so than with many of the other motherboards we have worked with so no complaints about that on this board. Many people will want to use the nTune feature for Windows based overclocking, but we did it the old way in the BIOS itself. nTune offers the beginning overclocker a easy to use GUI that automatically will try and set your system at its best performance levels.
We used the 3.46GHz and 3.73GHz CPUs in our overclocking tests and the limits of the CPU were the only thing holding back the CPU from going any further past its default state. We had intended to go all with a Swiftech 80mm liquid cooler, but thinking NVIDIA equals AMD I ordered an Athlon64 kit instead of the LGA775 kit so I was limited to air-cooling this review. As I stated earlier the BIOS allows the user to alter the FSB and memory speeds along with the memory voltage. The new Corsair 5400 modules actually overclocked with the best speeds and I had the memory running 744MHz without any problems or voltage increases, I could not get the board to post with the FSB increased to anything over 1226MHz. I am sure that when the major manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte and ABIT make boards overclocking features will be an area they focus on even more. I was quite amazed that I could not find a place in the BIOS to custom control my memory settings and that would be my only complaint about the BIOS. I like to be able to manually set my memory's RAS, CAS and timing settings, and this BIOS had nowhere to alter or adjust them. What the BIOS wanted the memory settings to run at are what they ran at period. This is a very surprising thing for a board geared at enthusiasts and I hope is something that is addressed in future BIOS updates.
