BIOS

The main BIOS page is designed in black-and-white with rare splashes of color, which goes very well with the color scheme of the mainboard itself. By pressing F6 you can save the current settings. BIOS Setup of abit IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi allows saving up to 5 user profiles and load any of them by pressing F7.

I was upset to find almost no information on the BIOS settings and features in the mainboard’s user manual. We are very well familiar with the BIOS peculiarities of abit’s products, besides, there are comments for many options in the BIOS itself, however, I think they should have also taken into account those users who deal with abit mainboards for the first time, and for them these comments may not be sufficient. This is one of the few evident drawbacks about abit IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi that I discovered.

The mainboard BIOS is based on modified Phoenix-Award code and its most peculiar distinguishing feature is the uGuru Utility section with an almost complete collection of overclocking-friendly options and settings.

If the SPD of your memory modules contain Nvidia settings profiles, then you will be able to get more aggressive default timings by enabling SLI-Ready Memory option.

FSB frequency is measures in quadrupled value and varies from 400MHz to 3000MHz. if we translate it into more common values the interval will look like this: 100-750MHz. However, you will hardly have any difficulty with the numbers because the Estimated New CPU Clock information line reports the CPU frequency that you will get once the changes have been applied. By the way, you can employ the desired settings immediately from the BIOS by pressing F8 – OC On The Fly.

You can select one of the two FSB adjustment modes: Linked (synchronously with the memory) and Unlinked (asynchronously). By selecting one or the other you enable corresponding sets of parameters for further adjustment.

In the first case you can use FSB:Memory Ratio parameter to set the current FSB and memory frequency ratio from the limited list of values, which depend on the nominal bus frequency of the CPU installed in your system. Actually, we expected that the set of supported dividers should change if the N/B Strap CPU As parameter is changed. This parameter can be set to PSB533, PSB800, PSB1066, and starting with BIOS version 1.1 it can also be set to PSB1333, however, the set of supported dividers remained the same: 1:1, 5:4, 3;2 or Sync Mode (synchronously with the processor bus frequency).

If we choose the asynchronous mode, then FSB:Memory Ratio and N/B Strap As parameters are no longer available to us. We can simply set the memory frequency between 400MHz and 1400MHz with MEM (DDR2) parameter. Then the mainboard will find the most optimal coefficient from a pretty broad list so that the final memory frequency could be the closest to our selection. The resulting memory frequency will then be reflected in the Estimated DDR2 Data Rate line.

This may seem like a very complicated description, but it is actually all very simple in reality. The PCI-E bus frequencies and different voltages can also be adjusted easily. They are singled out into an individual page:

The mainboard offers very diverse options for processor Vcore, Vmem and Vchipset adjustment. It supports the following value intervals:

• CPU Core Voltage: from the nominal to 1.925V with 0.01V increment;
• DDR2 Voltage: from 1.8V to 3.0V with 0.025V increment;
• DDR2 Ref Voltage: +2%, 0%, -2%, -4%;
• NB DDR2 Ref Voltage: +2%, 0%, -2%, -4%;
• CPU VTT Voltage: from 1.2V to 1.5V with 0.01V increment;
• NB Voltage: from 1.35V to 1.55V with 0.05V increment;
• SB Voltage: from 1.5V to 1.7V with 0.05V increment;
• HyperTransport Voltage: from 1.2V to 1.4V with 0.05V increment.

From uGuru Utility page you can get access to ABIT EQ. Here you can disable beeps and select the desired LED effect (pick the blinking pattern for the LEDs on the reverse side of the PCB, make them permanently on or off).

abit mainboards have always boasted extremely rich options for temperature, voltage and fan rotation speeds monitoring and control. abit IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi is certainly no exception here.