Foxconn MARS to have 504 CPU voltage settings

Posted at: 10:43am 3rd August 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Foxconn gives us a sneak preview of the new Gladiator BIOS on its MARS motherboards, with more voltage options than you can shake a stick at. If you were inclined to shake a stick at a computer, that is

Tweaking your CPU’s voltage can be a fine art, and you often get the feeling that there’s some safe middle ground between the setting that works and the setting that locks up your PC. The problem is that most motherboards don’t have a particularly fine-grain control over your voltage settings, but Foxconn is about to change all that with the new Gladiator BIOS on its new MARS motherboards.

Much like the way in which you change the clock speed of your CPU, the voltage settings in the Gladiator BIOS work on the principle of a base voltage and a multiplier. Not only that, but the increments between each multiplier setting are tiny, going up by around 1.036 with each step. This allows you to vary the voltage from 0.825V to 2.0736V, with 504 possible combinations.

As well as this, there’s also a fine-grain control over the DRAM voltage, which can be taken all the way up to 3.365V and you can, of course, also adjust the voltage of the Northbridge and Southbridge.

Foxconn’s MARS motherboard is based on Intel’s P35 chipset, and is due to be launched in September.