The BIOS

The SB95P V2's BIOS is loaded with tweaking options that Shuttle neatly consolidates on a single page. Front-side bus speeds are available up to 355MHz, and CPU voltages go up to 1.5875V, leaving plenty for overclocking enthusiasts to play with.

In addition to CPU voltages, the BIOS also offers a range of memory and chipset voltage tweaking options. The DDR2 voltage tweakability was particularly useful during our testing. Even with the latest BIOS, the SB95P V2 wasn't stable with the "auto" memory voltage setting. Arbitrarily setting the DDR2 voltage to 1.8V resolved the issue, though. We used pre-production Micron DDR2 DIMMs for testing, so I'm hesitant to blame the memory voltage issue on the SB95P V2 or its BIOS.

Enthusiasts have always craved BIOS-level performance tweaking options, but massaging fan speeds to balance performance and noise levels has become increasingly popular. Thankfully, the SB95P V2's BIOS provides users with plenty of control over the system's cooling fans, including an array of constant fan speeds and a linear Smart Fan setting with a temperature trigger that can be set between 30 and 80 degrees C.

The SB95P V2's BIOS is even equipped with LED brightness control, allowing users to choose between blinding and more subtle glows.

One feature that the SB95P V2's BIOS lacks, however, is a temperature-driven shutdown or alarm condition. Although the Pentium 4's internal thermal throttling mechanism should prevent the CPU from spontaneously combusting in the event of a catastrophic cooling failure, it would be nice if users could at least define a temperature-based alarm. It would also be nice if Shuttle added support for the SB95P V2 to its XPC Tools software, which allows users to monitor system hardware and tweak fan profiles and BIOS options from within Windows, but that's a whole other matter.