The Bios:

The BIOS used on the A8V is the standard AMI bios and if you've used any bios before you wont have trouble working your way round it. There are a selection of screens below which show the main features in the BIOS however before we get to them we need to detail some issues we had with the 1.005 and 1.006 bios on the A8V.

First Issue: CPU overheats to 90+ degrees

By default the board defaults to Auto overclocking, this results in the CPU voltage being 1.7v+ rather than the AMD spec 1.5v for the FX53. The knock on effect was our CPU hitting 90+ degrees celcius...certainly not safe!

Second Issue: Voltage/overclocking settings

In an attempt to fix the above concern we entered the BIOS and set the overclocking options to manual and set the CPU voltage manually to 1.5. This did reduce the temp slightly however things were still not good. We found that the board is off by 0.1v on its Vcore reading meaning the voltage actually sits at 1.6v when set at 1.5v in the BIOS. In order to get close to the AMD spec voltage you need to manually set the voltage to 1.425v (the minimum available on the A8V).

Third Issue: Voltage/Overclocking

We also found the voltage overclocking section of the bios to be slightly misleading. In our attempt to fix the overheating we selected "standard" for the overclocking option to us this would mean stock settings, its not. Standard uses the wrong multiplier/HT to get 2400mhz on the FX-53. This means the HT is 20mhz too high and in turn the memory is overclocked. On the memory we initially used on the system we were having blue screens during install, this was the cause as the memory couldnt handle the overclock. In summary, the only way for us to get the correct voltage/multiplier and HT speed on the A8V was to manually set all options in the bios to the values they should be.

Its worth noting though that having searched various forums on the internet it seems that this has been a concern which happened to us alone, there are no reports of overvolting etc from other FX-53 users. (Our FX-53 works without issue in the MSI k8T Neo2-FIR) We did however forward the above details to Asus so they may perform further testing and resolve any concerns found in a bios update, if anything the default BIOS options should at least be set to manual and not auto in future revisions.

For the performance user the BIOS as you can see is completely configurable with regards to voltages, cpu speed. Multipliers and memory settings.