As for the last subsection on the Performance page called Bus Override, there is only one parameter that could be of interest to us here. It allows adjusting the PCI Express bus frequency in the interval from 101MHz to 109MHz.

Other sections’ names speak for themselves. Security:

Power:

Boot:

BY the way, the Boot section also has a lot of features. There you can set the boot-up devices order, enable/disable boot-up from optical media, network, USB. Booting the system from a USB device, what could be simpler? Just enable or disable it and done! Nope, it is a little more complicated than that. USB Boot enables or disabled booting from a USB device; Boot USB Devices First allows booting from a USB device once one is available, no matter what the boot-up order is; USB Mass Storage Emulation Type sets the type of this device. You can set it to Auto, you can always use FDD or HDD emulation, you can set the type in accordance with the storage capacity. For example, USB-FDD will be set for all flash drives with up to 256MB storage capacity, and USB-HDD – for all devices with larger storage capacity.

The Exit section also has one very interesting feature, besides the standard “save”, “don’t save”, “load optimal settings”. Save Custom Defaults allows saving the current settings and Load Custom Defaults – loading them quickly afterwards. In other words, the board allows saving one complete BIOS settings profile. Just one, and without any description, though this is still better than nothing. There are not that many mainboards out there that boast features like that.

When we described the PCB layout of our Intel DX38BT mainboard, we mentioned a configuration jumper. If you reset it, then you can access the Maintenance page on the next boot-up.

Summing up everything we have just discussed about the Intel DX38BT BIOS, we can conclude that it looks very unusual and the logic behind its structure is not always evident. For example, why would we need two sections with similar names: Boot Configuration and Boot? Then why does the former contain fan rotation speed management options? There are a few individual drawbacks, such as the absence of the info string with the resulting memory frequency, which makes changing it very inconvenient; the low maximum for the FSB frequency of only 500MHz, which may not be enough for successful overclocking of slower Core 2 Duo processors using x7 multiplier; unknown current voltage setting for the CPU, memory and chipset… However, overall, the Intel DX38BT mainboard offers all the tools necessary for CPU and memory overclocking. Let’s see how this theory finds its way into practical experiments.