Installation:
Overall the layout allowed me to make a pretty clean installation into a Lian-Li PC-C36 HTPC case, although I find myself wondering at the inclusion of a serial port, floppy header, and LPT header on the top right corner of the motherboard. While I personally wouldn't miss any of these ports,
ASUS makes a reasonable compromise by including them but not allocating prime real estate on the crowded motherboard. If you are a user who needs these ports, you may have accessibility issues in some of the smaller cases.
The BIOS:
The
ASUS P5N7A-VM uses a familiar form of the AMI BIOS. The BIOS consists of the following six tabs: Main, Advanced, Power, Boot, Tools, Exit. In the below left image we see the Main screen. This is the screen users are greeted with when they first enter the BIOS configuration. The below right screen shows the Advanced tab; this is where most of the configuration takes place.
The CPU Configuration screen is shown in the below left image; here we have the typical multiplier setting as well as other CPU settings like C1E (Advanced Halt State) and CPU TM (Throttling). The below middle and right images are from the Jumper Free Options menu. Voltage and frequency settings for the CPU, Memory, GPU and Chipset are accessed from this page.
The final page that may be unfamiliar to many users is the MCP7A Chipset Configuration menu option on the Advanced tab. This is where users enable/disable Hybrid SLI (GeForce Boost) and set the frame buffer size for the iGPU. Options range from 32MB to 512Mb. This is also where you go to disable the onboard GPU if you have installed a discrete graphics card, although keeping it enabled will at a minimum allow you to use the onboard card as a dedicated PhysX engine.
