BIOS:
The BIOS for the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution X48 ATX motherboard is by American Megatrends, and it of course includes a bunch of features you would expect to see on just about any motherboard. In this section we will take a closer look at just the items that may be of greater interest.
The Ai Tweaker tab is shown below, and it is perhaps the most extensive page of overclocking and optimizing options I have ever encountered. Even in auto mode where the bulk of the options are hidden or greyed out, you still need to page down in order to see everything. Get a bit more serious with some manual overclocking, and the list of configurable settings is rather overwhelming. Tons of things I have used before, but many I had never seen before. The below left screen shows the top of the Ai Tweaker tab, and it provides a bit of a spoiler to the overclocking section of the review. Here you can adjust things like the CPU ratio (multiplier), frontside bus frequency (in 1MHz increments), DRAM frequency (by presets determined by the FSB), and DRAM timings (with a wide range of fine controls for all aspects). Much of these features are what you would expect in a board from ASUS, which is a good thing.
 
The above right image shows the same part of the page, this time with the system taken out of manual mode and configured to use the memory's XMP profile data for optimization. While it is best to put all the other settings in auto at this point, you can manipulate features you would like to tweak. For example, the E6850 processor has a stock speed of 3.0GHz (9x333MHz), but the XMP profile of the 1600MHz DDR3 used for testing bumps that to 3.2GHz (8x400MHz). I found that even with XMP in the driver's seat, I could do some backseat driving and bump the multiplier up to 9, so the total speed was now 3.6GHz.
One issue I eventually discovered regarding XMP profiles is that you may be hard pressed to ignore them. While I want the system to run with XMP enabled in every day use, for testing I needed to run at stock speed fo comparison purposes and in order to test the EPU features. Unfortunately EPU will not work with the system at anything other than stock settings. This means no overclocking, underclocking, voltage adjustments, timing changes, and no use of XMP profiles. No big deal, I entered the BIOS and set it to auto, and rebooted to see the power savings. AI Suite (the application used to control EPU) balked at my attempt due to overclocking. I checked CPU-Z and it was right, I was still running in XMP mode. I fought with this for days, and in the end the only way to use EPU was to have memory installed that didn't have an XMP profile onboard. Up until that point I had PC3-12800 kits from Crucial, Aeneon, Patriot, and G.Skill on hand, and all of them had XMP profiles in SPD. I was only able to test the EPU features because a Kingston brand PC3-12800 kit showed up without an XMP profile onboard.
The screen below is again from the AI Tweaker tab, and is provided to show the stock DRAM frequency options provided. While most high speed kits 'should' default to 1066MHz, XMP profiles will push them higher. Here you can see that 1600MHz, 1800MHz, and 2000MHz speeds are supported, and the *s on either side of these entries are provided to indicate that overclocking is required.
 
The above right screen provides more detail from the Ai Tweaker screen, this time even farther down the page. What you see is a good deal of information on the memory timings, and while I recognize the first several entries, as I got into the groups entitled "2nd Information" and "3rd Information", I was in uncharted waters. I looked up a bunch of the values to better understand them, but for testing purposes I stuck to manipulating the four most typical options, as shown.
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