ASUS M4N72-E Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

ASUS uses a modified version of the American Megatrends AMIBIOS for their M4N72-E motherboard. The menu is split up into Main, Ai Tweaker, Advanced, Power, Boot, Tools and Exit. Main menu has the time, date, HDDs detected Storage Configuration, and System information. The Storage Configuration is where you set up RAID to be enabled.

Using the TurboV utility I was able to run the system in Rocket mode at 3.96GHz with ease and totally stable. This is a 30% increase in clock speed using the AMD reference cooler for the Phenom II X4 940 CPU. I imagine that with a little more tweaking and voltage modifications I should break over 4GHz without difficulty especially if I use a stronger cooling system.

The majority of the overclocking on the board is done in the Ai Tweaker menu. This is where the AI Overclocking is enabled; the CPU Ratio, the FSB Frequency, the PCIe frequency and many other settings are set. Voltages are set in this menu as well. One thing to note is that there are so many settings I've put them down on a chart for convenience.

Setting	Range
CPU Frequency	Auto, 8x-CPU Dependent
FSB Frequency	200-600 in 1MHz increments
PCIE Frequency	100-150 in 1MHz increments
DRAM Frequency	667/800/1067MHz
CPU/NB Frequency	Auto, 800, 1000,1.2GHz, 1.4GHz, 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz
HT Link Speed	Auto, 200-1.8GHz in 200MHz increments
Bank Interleaving	Disabled, Auto
Channel Interleaving	Disabled, address bits 6, Address bits 12, XOR of Address bits: 20:16, 6 XOR of Address bits 20:16, 9
Enable Clock to all DIMMS	Disabled, Enabled
DRAM Command Rate	1T, 2T
DRAM Timing mode	Auto, Both
TCL	3-7 Clocks
TRCD	3-6 Clocks
TRP	3-6 Clocks
TRTP	2-4 CLK, 3-5CLK
TRAS	5 CLK, 6CLK-17 CLK, 18 CLK
TWR	3-6 CLK
TRRD	2-5 CLK
CPU VDDA Voltage	1.8-2.8v
DRAM Voltage	1.8-2.5v
HT Voltage	1.2v-1.5v
NB Voltage	1.3v-1.6v
NB 1.8V Voltage	1.8-2.0v

BIOS Screenshots