It is really cool, but in order to fully reveal the overclocking potential of this board and our test processor we had to set Over-Clocking Navigator to Manual OverClock. Only in this case we will be able to enjoy the rich functionality of Biostar TP45 HP mainboard.

If we disable Intel SpeedStep technology, we will be able to change the processor clock frequency multiplier and set the fractional multipliers for 45nm CPUs.  The CPU Frequency Setting parameter sets the FSB frequency in the interval from 100 to 800MHz with 1MHz increment. Over Clock Retry Count sets the number of times the board tries to boot during over-overclocking or incompatible parameters settings (from 1 to 7).

 Everywhere - on the web-site, on the mainboard box, in the user’s manual and marketing materials - they stress that Biostar TP45 HP supports CPUs with 1600 (400) MHz FSB. However, we can only set FSB(Bsel) To NorthBridge Latch parameter to FSB 800, FSB 1066 or FSB 1333. This parameter determines the list of available memory dividers. If you leave it at Auto, then you will get access to all dividers.

I would like to say that if the FSB frequency changes, so will the DRAM Frequency parameter. In other words, we will always know the expected memory frequency without any manual calculations.

DDR2 Enhance Mode parameter may be set to Auto, Enable or Disable. DRAM Timing Configuration will move us to a separate page with memory timings.

DDR2 RCOMP Configuration parameter is pretty interesting. It allows selecting one of the four preset profiles or let the board decide one that in Auto Config mode. Another advantage - Static tREAD Value(PL) parameter  that sets the Performance Level and even when the timings are set from SPD we can still see all the current values. Unfortunately, there is no Auto setting for each of the individual timings: so you either set all of them to Auto, or adjust all of them manually.

Clock Gen Configuration parameter opens a sub-section with chipset settings: CPU Clock Skew Control, (G)MCH Clock Skew Control, CPU Clock Driving Control. Here you can also set PCI Express bus frequency from 100 to 150 MHz with 1MHz increment.

Voltage Configuration parameter let’s you change the voltages. Here we can also point out a few implementation advantages as well as a few drawbacks.

First of all, some of the monitoring data from Hardware Health Configuration are duplicated here, which makes finding the most optimal settings simpler and faster. Moreover, there is an illustrative color-coding involved: safe values are highlighted green, higher values – yellow, and dangerously high values – red.

Note that some parameters are set to Auto by default. In other words, the smart mainboard BIOS will increase these parameters during overclocking on its own. It is a good thing, however, there is no Normal settings here, so you can’t leave these parameters at their nominal values: either the board will increase them automatically, or you have to increase them yourself.

Another not the most convenient solution: the board sets the voltages not in absolute values (1.2, 1.3, 1.4 V...), but in relative values (+0.1, +0.2, +0.3 V...), without mentioning the nominal values anywhere. The supported voltage intervals are pretty wide, but it is not always convenient to use a variable increment. The only exception is the CPU Voltage parameter: we can have up to +0.7875 V sent to the processor with a fixed increment of 0.0125 V. However, Vmem first changes with 0.05 V increment, starting from +0.3 V the increment increases to 0.1 V, starting from +1.1 V – to 0.2 V, and after +1.5 V it drops back to 0.05 V and remains like that up until we reach the maximum Vmem of +1.85 V.