Alienware Area-51 7500 Gaming System

BIOS Details Inspect the Alien's BIOS

Upon entering the Area-51 7500's BIOS, we were greeted with the familiar Phoenix AwardBIOS CMOS setup utility. Since the Phoneix AwardBIOS is so commonly used by motherboard OEMs, many of you are probably already very familiar with how to navigate this BIOS. In the main menu, you can see all of the general BIOS options. There really isn't much exciting in the first two sub-menus (Standard CMOS Features and Advanced BIOS Features).

The exciting, enthusiast-oriented options are found in the Advanced Chipset Features sub-menu. In this menu, you can adjust system clocks, front side bus and memory speed, memory timings, CPU configuration, system voltages and more. In the second and third pictures below, you can see that the CPU multiplier can be adjusted from 6 to 60. Only the multipliers supported by the CPU will work, however.

In the FSB & Memory Config screen, you can tweak the FSB (front side bus) and memory speeds and ratios. Additionally, you can change the memory timing values.

The System Voltages sub-menu allows you to adjust the voltages of the following parameters: CPU core, CPU FSB, memory, nForce SPP, nForce MCP, and HT nForce SPP - MCP. This amount of flexibility should appeal to the tweaking fanatics out there.

One final sub-menu worth taking a quick peek at is System Monitor. This screen functions as a system health/status monitor. You can check current temperatures, voltages and fan speeds.