This way, most overclocking fans will definitely be very happy with the new ABIT IC7-MAX3. This mainboard seems to be the offering the today’s richest opportunities for FSB and memory frequencies adjustment, and moreover, allows raising the Vdimm very far up. In other words, ABIT adjusted its new mainboard not only for regular overclocking, but also for extreme overclocking needs. I was also very please to discover that this mainboard allows to clear all settings and bring them back to default values in case of over-overclocking, while may other mainboard manufacturers very often forget about this important option. If you press and hold the INS key during system boot-up, you will be able to access BIOS Setup and reset the faulty parameter values.

Besides Softmenu Setup, I would also like to draw your attention to BIOS Setup Advanced Features Setup page. Here you can adjust memory timings and enable ABIT’s brand name Game Accelerator technology. The page contains settings for DRAM CAS# Latency (you can set it to 2, 2.5 or 3), DRAM Precharge Delay (available values: 5, 6, 7 or 8), DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay and DRAM RAS# Precharge, (available values are 2, 3 or 4). In general, this is a pretty common set of features. As for Game Accelerator technology, it is worth dwelling on separately.

ABIT introduced its Game Accelerator technology quite a while ago. As you may remember, its major goal was to increase the performance of i865PE based mainboards up to the level of i875P based ones. However, ABIT IC7-MAX3 is already based on the faster i875P chipset. So, what the Game Accelerator technology so in this case then? It turns out to have a really big influence on the performance or our today’s hero, too. The thing is that when you go to the BIOS Setup and set the Game Accelerator mode to Auto, Turbo, Street Racer or F1, it automatically changes such important memory subsystem settings Refresh Cycle Time, Read Delay (tRD), Read Delay Adjust (tRDA) and Command Per Clock (CPC). Refresh Cycle Time is responsible for the data refresh rate in the dynamic memory cells, Read Delay (tRD) and Read Delay Adjust (tRDA) manage the memory requests frequency during data reading, and Command Per Clock (CPC) determines the address commands transfer rate.

Advanced users can set these parameters manually, however, ABIT offers a much easier way: choose the most suitable work mode from the 4 already existing presets taking into account the type of memory modules you are using. Thus, the Turbo preset will suit for almost any memory modules; Street Racer preset requires memory modules of pretty high quality, and F1 will work only in case you have the best DDR SDRAM. In order to evaluate how greatly different Game Accelerator settings affect the system performance, we undertook a few simple tests, by changing only this parameter in the BIOS Setup.