EVGA P55 Classified 200 LGA1156 Motherboard Review

BIOS Rundown

A new chipset, brings a whole new BIOS to the world of EVGA motherboards. Changing from Award Phoenix BIOS of old, EVGA has moved to an American Megatrend (AMI) BIOS for its entire P55 lineup. Talking with one of the engineers, Peter Tan, it was a necessary move as AMI was the only BIOS readily available for P55 support. Despite the new BIOS, however, the layout and ease of navigation familiar to EVGA users is almost the same; let's take a look.

These first couple of sections really don't facilitate a big discussion. They are appropriately labeled and everything you expect to find in them for options are where they should be. EVGA really has done a good job making this BIOS intuitive and easy to find the settings you are looking for.

Again, the Advanced Chipset Feature, PCI/PNP Resource Management, and Power Management sections are very self explanatory. The Advanced Chipset section is where we can enable and disable the various onboard components such as network controllers and the audio controller. The Power Management section is where those interested in S1/S3 sleep modes are going to find all of the settings accompanying that feature.

The Hardware Health Configuration section is where we find all our voltage, fan speed, and temperature monitors. For temperatures, we are only given a CPU temperature (not core temperatures), a PWM Vreg temperature sensor, and a random System temperature reading. These are all anyone could pretty much need, considering the PCH doesn't play much if any role in the systems operation so monitoring its temp isn't even necessary.

We also have a limited number of voltages being reported in this section which gives us an indication as to which voltages will be reported in Windows in the EVGA E-LEET software. The only four worth noting are vCORE, VDIMM, VTT, and PCH. So far the reporting section of the P55 Classified is fairly limited and far from exhaustive but all the necessary values are listed.

The last job that this section satisfies is that of the onboard fan headers. In the upper portion there are only three of the seven fan headers listed indicating the fan speed of the hardware connected to them. Only three fan headers are monitored and that means only three fan headers can be controlled from the BIOS. They are the CPU fan header at the top of the board, the PWR fan header in-between the NF200 heat sink and the audio connections at the rear I/O panel, and a CHA fan header down in the lower right corner by the P55 chipset. These three fan headers are able to be controlled from this section either through RPM speed, by specifying Duty Cycle, or SmartFan which lets you set various temperature thresholds for increasing the fans RPMs.

We have finally made it to the Frequency/Voltage Control section which where we will call overclock central. EVGA has done an extremely good job with the BIOS up to this point keeping everything in appropriate sections without a spider web of sub-menu's to find everything. The same holds true for the Frequency/Voltage Control section as we only have two sub-menu's, one for memory and one for the CPU settings. Everything else is in one big long page but thanks to the convenient PgUp and PgDn keys functioning in this AMI BIOS, jumping through this section is a piece of cake.

There are two sub-menus that we will look at in a minute, the rest of the list is laid down very well. The most important stuff on top with our frequency controls followed by the host of voltages we can adjust. We like the fact that the current CPU frequency and memory frequency listed right on this page and the fact that they dynamically change as we adjust settings. This lets us know what the system will be running at without having to use a calculator or, god forbid, think. This holds true for voltages as our currently set voltages is listed for each voltage that we can adjust. These are small things that really make the BIOS a dream to work in, especially for the active overclocker.

We don't have complete praise though for the BIOS, the ability to directly punch in values for BCLK is there, but no voltages. We have to manually cycle through the voltages using + or - keys. ASUS has the ability in AMI BIOS's to directly punch in the value using the keypad for voltages and we would love to see the same for the EVGA BIOS. Really though, that is about all we can complain about. This section, like the rest of the BIOS, is very well laid out and easy to work with.

The last of the options in this section is the ability to save and load complete BIOS profiles. The good part about these profiles are that they save the entire BIOS, not just this section. The downside is again the inability to label the profiles. We just have Profile 1 through 4 as seen in the sidebar. It really would be nice to label them as it is easy enough to forget what each profile is exactly. One note of caution, anytime you update your BIOS, you DO NOT want to load a profile from an older BIOS. Settings and values can change, so remember to setup a completely new profile with a BIOS update.

Here now is a chart of the voltages available from the EVGA P55 Classified BIOS.

Like all enthusiast level motherboards these days, the amount of voltage capable of the BIOS has all but eliminated the need for volt mods for the most part. Gone are the days of being limited by the board for the amount of volts you can send to your components. Nowadays the layout and features of the BIOS make them stand out against the others. We really like this BIOS for overclocking as the EVGA engineering squad have done a great job offering a lot of features other boards don't have that will enhance overclocking. Things like the vFREFs, and Signal adjustments can really help when pushing things to the limit.

The two sub-menus mentioned earlier are the memory timing table and the CPU Configuration page. Both pages are pretty self explanatory. The Memory Configuration page provides the vital timings for adjustment but does lack a few notables like Read To Write which can help with higher memory clocks as the board sometimes sets this value a little tight. The two big timings are available for manipulation though, Back-to-Back CAS Delay and Round Trip Latency. Both of these play a key role in performance and clocking of memory and the system.

The CPU Configuration page is simply where we can enable or disable various features of the CPU such as C-States, C1E, and Virtualization. We can also enable and disable Hyper-Threading here for CPU's that support it as well as enable or disable cores. With our i7 860 and i5 750 processors, we can choose between using all four cores or disabling two or three cores.

That about sums up the BIOS section. Like we said, overall we are quite pleased with the layout, the order of the sections, and the ease in with it is to navigate. We would just like to see direct input of voltages with the keypad, and a more robust profile save/load section.