|
The
Bios 
At
first glance, the BIOS appears to be the typical
Award BIOS seen in so many of today's motherboards.
When we first powered up the system and
entered the BIOS, it seemed all too familiar.
However, after tinkering with it we did
find some subtle differences
One
of the biggest surprises was the lack of an AGP Aperture setting under the Advanced
Chipset Features. This is the first time that we have seen this omission.
What the reason is for leaving this out is
unclear.
The
board is capable of increasing bus speeds in 1
MHz increments, rapidly becoming a necessity for over-clockers.
We were disappointed to see that DFI does
not allow for any type of voltage adjustment
though. They go it 1/2 right...
The
PC Health section of the Bios offers a good idea
on the status of our board at any given time.
Providing voltage readings as well as
Processor and Case temperature proved invaluable
when over- clocking our CPU.
This works in turn with Hardware Doctor, a
Windows utility that is included on the CD that
displays the same information in Windows along
with alarms if any limits have been exceeded.
 |
| Over-clocking
The DFI CS60-EC |
| Nice... |
|
Over
clocking the CPU was pretty straight forward.
With the bus speed set at 144MHz, we were
able to reach a stable 1.008 GHz with our 933.
If there were voltage settings incorporated
into the BIOS, we feel that we might have exceeded
this number.
It is important to note that this is the
first time over-clocking this particular CPU.
Should it prove to over-clock higher on
another motherboard, we’ll let you know.
Another
way to over-clock with this board is to use the utility
that came with the CD, Over-clock Cruise.
Over-clock Cruise is a simple application
that loads into the taskbar when Windows starts
and allows easy and fast changes to the system bus
speed.
I
am not normally a fan of little utilities that use
up unnecessary RAM, but Over-clock Cruise proved to
be quite a sweet little app.
Let’s not forget to mention that it has a
sharp interface too!
To back up my memory argument though, after
installing Over-clock Cruise and rebooting, my
system resources dropped from a steady 94% free to
88%. That’s
a little too much for my liking.
 |
| The
Hot Hardware Test
System |
| Not
a bad rig... |
|
DFI CS60-EC
(Intel i815EP) with an Intel PIII @ 933MHz &
1.01GHz.
256MB
of Mushkin 2-2-2 Rev. 2 RAM
IBM
DTLA307015 15Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
nVidia
GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card
Plextor
PlexWriter 12/10/32
Pioneer
16/40 DVD Rom
Windows
Millennium
Direct
X 8.0a and nVidia reference drivers V.6.50
 |
| Processor
Performance |
| Business
Winstone... |
|
Of
course, the only way to truly gauge the
performance of the board is to give it a battery
of tests to chew on.
For starters, we’ll feed it Business
Winstone as an appetizer followed by a main course
of Content Creation with some Quake 3 on the side.
For dessert, we have a wide variety of
Sandra 2001SE to satisfy your cravings.
Let’s get going…
First
up is Business Winstone...
Business
Winstone
Although
it’s nothing spectacular, this is still a
respectable number. Let's see how she
handles CC Winstone, Quake 3, and Sandra...
CC Winstone,
Quake 3, and Sandra |
