Difficulty Factor Of This Board Is "10" (grin)
the memory is a bear to set once you go beyond reasonable levels for a dual core and a Quad core, like mine with dual L2's!
i went from 470 fsb to 475 and it required a change in PL level and DDR2 Comp Reconfig...it appears that a 20 fsb jump is going to require to adjust the cpu skew control, mch skew and possibly the cpu pll...i was able to use 1.8v for cpu pll...never could do that before.
also, it appears that cpu skew and mch skew might require a 200ps difference...right now i am using 200ps for the cpu skew and 400 for mch skew.
i am trying to find the balance of memory settings and those skew controls.
it would have been nice for biostar's engineers to list all these changes in the bios in a row (on one page) like gigabyte does for the X48 boards.
I Think I Got It Stable For 490 Fsb @ 8x For My 9650
i've been working overtime on getting to 500 fsb for my 9650...i am currently at 490...i finally smarten up and used the built in Memory test....i was able to find the memory settings and cpu configurations to make it pass the built-in Memtest
i just dual boot installed Vista64 Ultimate, alongside XP, to see if that OS is more tuned with this 710 bios...it installed at 490 FSB @ 8x without a hitch...once i install SP1 on it, i will install the various benches and re-run them.