X-bit labs

ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Chipset: Built to Kill (page 8)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/22/2005 | 06:16 PM ]

BIOS and Overclocking

ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard was tested with the latest BIOS available at the time of the test session: version 1.2.

The BIOS of ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 mainboard is based on standard Award-Phoenix WorkstationBIOS v6.00PG microcode, however, it would be incorrect to claim that it is similar to the BIOS of competitor products. The differences from the other mainboards’ BIOS versions are clearly noticeably with the naked eye thanks to a special uGuru Utility. This unique section contains all overclocking friendly options on the special OC Guru page, and all monitoring options including FanEQ technology settings on the ABIT EQ page.

Also you can find some important options for overclocking in the Advanced Chipset Features page, from where you can manage the working frequency and the width of the HyperTransport bus, as well as change the memory settings.

Let’s take a closer look at the overclocking tools offered by ABIT Fatal1ty AN8. Among them are:

• The frequency of the clock generator forming the CPU frequency can be adjusted from 200 to 410MHz with 1MHz increment;
• The frequency of the PCI Express bus can be independently adjusted from 100 to 145MHz with 1MHz increment;
• The CPU frequency multiplier can be adjusted manually (reduced below the nominal value). The minimal value is 4x;
• The CPU voltage can be increased up to 1.85V with 0.025V increment;
• The memory voltage can be selected manually: from 2.5 to 2.8V with 0.05V increment;
• The DDR VTT voltage can be adjusted from 1.25V to 1.4V with 0.05V increment;
• The chipset voltage can be increased from the default 1.5V to 1.8V with 0.05V increment;
• The parameters responsible for the working frequency and width of the HyperTransport bus can also be adjusted. The frequency of this bus is set with a multiplier (to the clock generator frequency), which can be set to 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, and 5x. The width of the bus can be set to 8 or 16 bits in any direction.

This way, there is the whole bunch of various overclocking –friendly settings on ABIT Fatal1ty AN8. Although I wish the ranges supported by these settings were a bit wider. It is first of all about the memory voltage, which top limit of 2.8V can be insufficient for some serious overclocking experiments.

Also note that at OC Guru page there are two DDR Ref. Voltage and CPU Ref. Voltage settings, which should actually allow increasing or reducing the corresponding voltages additionally. However, to our great surprise these adjustments never affected anything.