Monarch Hornet Pro: "SFF" meets PCI Express, DDR2

Monarch Hornet Pro: BIOS

As with the vast majority of motherboards in the world, the Intel D925XBC motherboard utilizes a Phoenix Award BIOS.

Intel has practically made it a tradition not to offer any significant BIOS tweakability in their motherboards for years now. The D925XBC, unfortunately, ends up being no different. For example, as shown above, arguably the most important option in a modern day BIOS, the FSB, is only adjustable up to 4% of its 3.4GHz (3400MHz) core clock speed, or about 136MHz in other words. This is a very mediocre overclock, to put it nicely. We were hoping that Intel would do something special with their BIOS this time around, but we've come to expect these types of bland options from Intel, so we're not surprised. With Intel instituting locks on overclocks over 10%, Intel has all but publicly announced that they have stopped catering to true enthusiast builders.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Unlike several other previous high-end Intel motherboards, however, the D925XBC includes PCI and SATA bus adjustments. The PCI (32-bit) bus is merely available at two different speeds; it's not really "adjustable", per se. Those speeds are 36.36MHz and 40.00MHz. The SATA bus is a bit more adjustable, however, up to 109.42MHz in 1.32MHz increments. Neither bus is all that tweakable with the D925XBC motherboard, so these "adjustments" end up being mostly useless for even semi-serious enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, we couldn't really test the limits of the Intel D925XBC motherboard's memory functionality without better DDR2 adjustments available in the BIOS. There was only a 533MHz and 667MHz option available to tune, and the D925XBC certainly wasn't capable of a memory overclock up to 667MHz with the memory that we were using. However, internal testing performed by other AnandTech editors has revealed that soon-to-be released DDR2 memory will be capable of tremendous overclocks somewhere in the upper 600MHz+ range. This, in conjunction with faster Intel CPUs (perhaps beyond 4GHz), could really be the saving grace of the LGA775 Prescott platform, which to this point has been lackluster to say the least. Only time will tell if Intel can churn out enough high end processors to really get Prescott moving into the high performance direction that the enthusiast community wants to see them reach. According to early overclocking tests, massive clock speed scaling and higher memory speeds should do the trick for Prescott.

One of the most positive things to take from the D925XBC BIOS is that it has fan control options. The BIOS mostly includes just a single fan speed option ranging from slowest to fastest (and an option for enabling or disabling, but that's pretty standard). This option does indeed lower overall system noise when set to its slowest setting, but as we mentioned before the biggest noise culprit with the pre-built Hornet Pro we received (versus the barebones version) was the video card's fan speed and the noise of the dual 74GB Raptors. Due to these issues, we decided to install less beefier components to see just how quiet the Hornet Pro could get. With an X600XT and Seagate 7200.7 installed instead of the 6800 Ultra and dual Raptors, overall system noise went down tremendously with just the PSU, processor and case fans making any other noise. All those fans may seem like a lot on the surface, but most of the fans are spinning at a very low RPM to begin with. All in all, the Hornet Pro's dB levels are about average when compared to other high-end SFFs we've tested (Soltek EQ3801, Shuttle SK83G, etc.) using identical components.

The Hornet Pro's Hardware Monitoring section is quite nice and includes some usable information. Some pertinent things worth mentioning include Vcore readings, three different "zone" temperatures that monitor different parts of the Hornet Pro's case, and a total of four fan speed readings for the processor, rear, AUX rear and front case fans. Besides those readings though, the D925XBC Hardware Monitoring section includes your standard array of PSU readings (all rails), and nothing else.