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It is your basic present generation ABIT bios, you know Stocked full of goodies. Plenty of options to OC, adjust, tweak, and play with.
With my 1700+ in there I decided to do a few tests. I picked user defined and jacked up the multiplier to 14x right off just to see if it worked. And it booted up right into windows at 1866Mhz. Great. So I tried the FSB OC next. Dropped it back to the default 11x multiplier and jacked it to 166fsb. It didn’t work. Put it at 165 and it went right in. So I did some reading, there have been a few people talking about this and apparently for now present BIOS’s only let you keep it in the 33fsb range of your current chip. So if you have a 133fsb chip it can go to 165, if you have a 166 it can do 199, and I would assume a 200fsb chip can run the whole gambit. Really this isn’t a major deal with this board being designed for the masses not the fringe OC’ers (but don’t count them down yet, it should be a bios update to release these options).
Lets look at the rest of the bios. The voltage adjustment category is very nice. You have CPU, RAM, North Bridge, & AGP, very nice options indeed. We have all welcomed Soft Menu III with open arms due to its impressive features, easy access and understanding, and awesome options and performance.
Really, the only other two things of the bios that need any attention is the memory section and the neat fan control setup. We have here your average timing adjustments or if you don’t belong rooting around in the bios it has the default SPD (Timings hard coded into your memory). The new FanEQ fan management option is very neat. You basically set some percentages in the bios where you decide what speed the fan should spin depending on the temp of the CPU. This is a relatively new feature to mboards. With this one you have control over the CPU and North Bridge fans.
Before we go any further I should also mention a nice piece of software included with this motherboard. We have Winbond Hardware Doctor (monitors critical components like fan speed, temps, and voltages), it warns you if things go critical and you can choose what to do about it (ignore, change’s in the bios, or if you know what you are doing disable it).
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