Genie BIOS Setting consists of three sub-sections. CPU Feature deals with the processor related technologies:

The list of options in the DRAM Timing sub-section is so long that it couldn’t fit into a single screen: the photo is put together from two screenshots:

But that is still not everything. Clock Setting Fine Delay and Read Delay Phase Adjust lead to separate pages with more additional settings, however, we have already seen it all. All the differences are in the Voltage Setting sub-section:

The section looks formally the same as before, the list of available parameters remained unchanged. The only thing that catches your eye is the CPU VID Special Add parameter highlighted red. It is the one, although red color doesn’t really matter. If you use a Conroe processor and not Penryn, it will not be red anymore, it will simply be inactive, i.e. its working principle remains different.

I would like to remind you that processor Vcore may be set using two parameters: CPU VID Control and CPU VID Special Add. They are not equal. CPU VID Control parameter sets the Vcore in an explicit form with a small increment of 0.00625V. In this case the mainboard will maintain the Vcore at the set rate even if the CPU is idling. CPU VID Special Add sets the voltage in percents from the nominal. It I not very convenient that you need to imagine what the resulting voltage is going to be, however, the current Vcore is displayed on the same page, so after a few attempts you will be able to set the desired voltage. In this case the CPU will drop the clock frequency multiplier to x6 and reduce the Vcore in idle mode and if Intel power-saving technologies are activated.

Both parameters used to work independently before. You could set the Vcore using CPU VID Control or using CPU VID Special Add. Now CPU VID Special Add parameter depends on CPU VID Control for some reason. It doesn’t work until you set the Vcore above 1.2V for 45nm CPUs or above 1.3V for 65nm CPUs. In other words, the whole procedure looks as follows: at first we increase CPU VID Control to 1.20625V or 1.30625V (depending n the CPU we use). Then we can change the CPU VID Special Add and set the desired voltage in percents. After that we can return CPU VID Control parameter to Auto again. Reboot the system, check what resulting voltage you’ve got and repeat the whole thing again if necessary.

Very inconvenient, to say the least of it. I don’t know why they had to make things so complicated. And most importantly, it makes overclocking harder and doesn’t allow using power-saving technologies in most cases. We are going to discuss a few examples in the next part of our article, and here we would only like to state that we managed to find two differences in the new mainboard’s BIOS: one good (an option to disable FireWire) and one bad (increasing processor Vcore has become more complicated). Everything else remained the same.