Closer Look: BIOS, Technologies, Overclocking

In the course of two or three years it became trendy to introduce brand-names for certain features and capabilities mainboards can offer us. For instance, ABIT calls functions for overclocking as “SoftMenu”, whereas thermal monitoring solutions is branded as “Thermal Guard”. Such names usually tell nothing to users, who are not familiar with ABIT or other mainboard makers and their product lineup. Moreover, sometimes it is pretty hard to put all the information straight when so many brand-names are used with every single mainboards. Moreover, I sometimes not sure about all those technologies either, given that they all are mixed up in BIOS and that actually makes the choice of mainboard a significantly more difficult task since we are not so sure what exactly we are looking for in terms of capabilities that are masked under certain brand-names. The most complex task is to choose a mainboard from MSI or ASUSTeK: both mainboard makers offer dozens of so-called technologies with their mainboards and those, who do not constantly track new mainboards will hardly be able to understand the meaning and intention of every technology.

Here is the list of technologies found on ABIT IC7 mainboard:

• SoftMenu: overclocking functions, including CPU frequency, PSB frequency. Memory frequency (PSB:MEM dividers), AGP/PCI frequency, memory voltage adjustment, AGP voltage tuning and CPU Vcore adjustment.
• Thermal Guard: system monitoring functions that allow your system to warn you in case one of the fans (CPU fan, MCH fan, system fan) stops. Note, that only one fan can be monitored. Additionally, it may turn the computer off once CPU fan fails to work or CPU temperature is too high.
• Tweak Guard: memory and AGP fine-tuning functions, including CAS latency time, Act to precharge delay, DRAM RAD# to CAS# delay, DRAM RAS# precharge, AGP aperture size and AGP data rate.
• Game Accelerator: to tell you the truth, this technology was added to the mainboard after the release and is basically nothing more than another set of memory fine-tuning capabilities, such as refresh cycle time, read delay (tRD), read relay adjust (tRDA) as well as command per clock (CPC). I decided not to cope with all those fine-tuning methods and used only presets ABIT has to offer, such as “Auto” “Turbo” “StreetRacer” and F1. Furthermore, I want to tell all the hardcore tweakers out there that there is hardly a point of memory fine-tuning on i865PE and i875P platforms since it gives almost no performance boost in real applications.
• FanEQ: a technology that is supposed to control speeds of CPU and MCH fans depending on the temperatures of your processor and i875P chipset (remember that NB fan is extremely loud on IC7). At this point it only controls MCH fan speed. I would recommend you to set the speed of NB fan at 70% and activate the full speed when the temperature exceeds 55 degrees Celsius. This ensures total stability and still maintains pretty quiet operation.

Traditionally, ABIT’s mainboards are renowned for excellent overclocking and tweaking capabilities. The IC7 is not an exception here and also offers great set of functions for power users.

Unfortunately, Intel’s ICH5R controller has a very interesting peculiarity: system with Serial ATA-150 hard disk drive will not boot in case PCI frequency is not 33MHz. According to various reports, other Serial ATA-150 controllers allow PCI overclocking, so, ABIT IC7-G with a third-party Serial ATA-150 RAID controller is more preferable for overlockers than ABIT IC7.

Due to the “feature” mentioned above, I was not able to overclock Quad Pumped Bus beyond 1066MHz. The processors I used was the same Intel Pentium 4 2.40C we used in our article “Intel Pentium 4 2.40C Overclocking”. Since overclocking results between the article and current experience are comparable, I do not think we should publish them at this point.