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The Epia uses a standard Phoenix Award BIOS and, considering the total overall power of the system, this kind of CMOS Setup utility appears an overachievement. There are a few options that could potentially be considered useful, examples are the selective enabling and disabling of peripherals such as audio or network but quite honestly, it is hard to justify the existence of the options other that they are part of the BIOS core from Award anyway. Overall, the most adequate and useful settings appear to be the selection of the boot sequence.

The Frequency / Voltage control option menu is commendable but does not hold up to much further scrutiny. Briefly, offering the options of running in PC1600 or PC2100 mode appears like the resurrection of a long-forgotten bad dream; with DRAM prices where they are, there should be no need of running DDR at lower speed than the processor bus, neither can we fathom any advantage of running PC2100 speed with a 100 MHz FSB Eden processor. On the other hand, users and reviewers alike are known to complain about the lack of even completely useless settings, so it appears that VIA is going the way of the least resistance here by giving a few options to play with.

Schematics of the VIA CLE266 chipset

The same goes for the bank interleave options. All DDR chips are built around four internal banks, there is no such thing as a commercially available DDR discreet with 2 internal banks, that option should really be scratched. Likewise, there is no point in turning bank interleaving off, yet, this very "disabled" setting is the default. The point is, the system is is not too fast in the first place, it doesn't need an additional boat anchor.

In view of the DDR speed being limited to 133 MHz as the highest, there is no point either in offering VDD adjustments of up to 2.8V, a DDR DIMM that does not run 133 MHz at default voltage should plain and simply not even be considered. In addition, the real VDD as measured on the slot was slightly inflated anyway, that is, all values were approximately 0.05V above the specified settings. Adjustments of the memory latencies, that is CAS- tRCD, tRP and tRAS fall pretty much into the same category even though here is at least some justification from a marketing standpoint.

Bottom line is that I am the last person to oppose flexible BIOS settings to tweak performance but some of the options given here only make sense as playground for those who need options regardless of what they mean.

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