Abit AN8 32X Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

ABIT uses a Phoenix Award BIOS. The Award BIOS is popular among many motherboard manufacturers today, including ASUS, ABIT and more. ABIT has their own propietary BIOS utility and chip they call uGURU. I like ABIT's utility as it overclocks the system in many ways both automatic and manual.

uGURU BIOS

ABIT allows you to overclock the CPU from the uGURU utility. The BIOS allows you to have a mutiplier from 9x-the maximum multiplier that the CPU supports (unless it's unlocked). FSB frequencies can be set from 200-400MHz. PCI Express frequencies can be set from 100-145MHz. The CPU voltage can be set from 1.5-1.9V in 0.025 increments. DDR Voltage can be set from 2.5V-3.2V in 0.10V increments.

ABIT also did a uGURU utility for Windows. This has several pre-sets for overclocking that are set automatically. Turbo overclocks the CPU 10%. Normal overclocks the CPU 5%. Quiet overclocks the CPU by 4MHz. Turbo wasn't a option for the 4000+ CPU we use for testing as it kept restarting and failing at that setting. The Normal and Quiet settings were totally stable throughout our rigorous testing regime.

Stability on the board was excellent. I ran SuperPI and MemTest on the board for several hours without any crashes. I put a ATI X1900XTX from ASUS in the board to test compatibility and no performance issues showed up. To test SLI I put two 7800GTs from EVGA in and ran some of the gaming tests. The system was totally stable and performance was exemplary, fully the equal of ASUS's A8N-32 SLI motherboard.

BIOS Shots