Intel has never been the company to enhance the overclocking community, and
that will most likely always be there stance as from their standpoint there
is a conflict of interest. They will now allow minimum overclocking in their
burn-in mode, but as far as advanced controlled options such as memory,
voltage and clock speed there are very minimal. Their BIOS is very simple to
use, and one that has been tried and tested from here to NASA, so user ease
is always a forefront in design. The BIOS has nothing to really go into
detail about in its modus operandi as it is very basic. Overclocking is
allowed in the Burn-In mode that allows a maximum of a 10% increase in
system performance. There are shots below of the various system control BIOS
screens.
Setup was rater a straightforward affair that offered no hurtles to get us through the setup process and since Intel includes their SATA drivers on a floppy, things couldn't get much easier. I really hate companies who do not have the common sense, or heck the common decency to include this minor, but very imperative thing inside their retail box. After all it costs about a half of a cent so I think the budget can include it and not break their price point. Intel always excels in areas like these and believe me it is appreciated, especially if you only have the system you are building and no other to take the SATA drivers from the CD to a floppy. Make sure to hit the F6 key when first installing Win XP as this will tell the setup prompter to allow you to install the proper SATA drivers in order for XP to detect your SATA hard drive and allow Windows installation.
Windows installation as well as installation of the Intel system drivers was nothing other than popping in the included CD and then clicking on the appropriate drivers and system software you want installed as seen in the pictures shown below. We installed Windows SP2 and all the latest drivers to insure the best and most stable results in our tests. The latest Direct-X drivers are required to run almost all the tests we run here in the lab so we installed it right off the bat. Intel offers the user a Windows based interface to verify and monitor your system via the Intel Desktop Control Center. This is a very easy to navigate and operate tool so anyone can install and use it on their Intel desktop motherboard. Overclocking as I have stated earlier is not Intel's thing so this tool is very monitor and verify system speed oriented, not a true overclockers tool. Next let us see how well the board does against its peers in the performance section of the review.
