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Abit AA8 Review :: Installation and BIOS
 When I received the motherboard, it has the first production BIOS firmware on it. It recognized the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz CPU no problem. It didn't boot with the Pentium 4 3.4 GHz Extreme Edition. Upgrading the firmware to version 1.2 solved the problem. After that point, I have not seen a glitch. I loved the detailed BIOS Settings. You would see all standard settings like CPU Clock, frequency and voltage, DDR voltage with a wide range of choices.    But this is just a start. You can lock DDR2 frequency to 400 or 533 MHz. Or system bus to 800 or 533. Especially to be able to lock PCI Bus to 33 MHz adds stability if you have PCI add on cards. They did not forget the PCI-E locking setting either.  DRAM Freq  System Bus  PCI Clock  PCI-E Clock They included the utilities like EQ and OC Guru on the motherboard driver CD. I have tested OCGuru when overclocking the system. When I set it to turbo, frequency is increased to 3700 MHz but the system is locked. I test it with my own settings and I was able to set the system to 3825 MHz. They have just set the Voltage settings to high for the Turbo preset. The trick is just to increase CPU voltage a bit, may be the memory too, Not all of them up to the roof. I run Burn-in on 3825 MHz, CPU got really hot but worked fine. You may see the default settings and my settings below.  OC Guru  OC Guru The System Health settings of the BIOS are simply amazing. You can trigger a shutdown or an alarm for any incident. Not just CPU Fan Failure or overheat shutdown but power supply voltage or temperatures too. They included the Windows utilities for you to check those settings on the CD.  Temp  Voltage  Fanspeed  EQ The BIOS collects the power cycle data. Power Cycle data is how many times you have restarted your PC or How many hours of total your PC was on and similar data. That data may really surprise you. They included the Windows utilities for you to check those settings on the CD.  Cycle 1  Cycle 2 Let's suppose you are experiencing problems with your motherboard and you call technical support. They ask you numerous questions about your system. What if there is a utility that does that job for you. Of course you need to enter some of the data manually but it helps to collect that data before calling them. Abit called it black box. Like the airplane black boxes. It doesn't work if your motherboard doesn't post. Let's suppose you called the tech support and they are telling you to flash the BIOS. Find the correct BIOS, download it, put it into a bootable floppy-hey they have the Live update utility. It will find the correct BIOS and flash it for you within Windows.  BIOS  Blackbox For ergonomics of the motherboard, it is really hard to say anything good. Power supply connection is in the front - middle of the motherboard. The fan controller headers for additional case fan or power supply fan is on the opposite site of the motherboard. The floppy is far back on the motherboard. Installed PCI Express Video card does not block the memory slot locks but gives you hard time when installing or uninstalling additional memory. CD Audio header is in between two PCI-E Slots. It looks like they didn't even care a bit about ergonomics.  Fan Header  Package Contents
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