ABIT Fatal1ty AN9 32X Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

ABIT used a modified version of the Phoenix Award BIOS for the Fatal1ty AN9 32X board. The customization of the BIOS starts with the BIOS screen color. On most motherboards, the screen color is a dark purple. ABIT decided to use a red colored screen to match their box colors and the PCB color of the Fatal1ty board. It is a great touch, as everything is color coded.

BIOS chip

Red BIOS screen

The options for overclocking the CPU are found in the uGURU. The CPU multiplier can be changed from x7 to x13 in the case of my 5000+ CPU. The FSB of the CPU can be set from 200 to 400MHz. The CPU voltage can be set from 1.35 to 1.750V in 0.025V increments. The DDR2 memory voltage can be set from 1.750V to 2.30V in 0.05V increments from 1.75 to 2.10V then in 0.10V increments from 2.10V to 2.30V. North Bridge 1.2V voltage can be set from 1.2V to 1.5V. NB 1.2V PCIe voltage can be set from 1.2V to 1.4V. The South Bridge 1.5V can be set from 1.5V to 2.0V. HyperTransport voltage can be set from 1.20V to 1.35V. Finally, the DDR2 Reference voltage can be set from -60mV to +60mV.

Due to the limitations of the CPU that we use for testing, overclocking is a hit or miss proposition, with a 10% overclock the maximum that can be realistically expected from a good board. Using ABIT's uGURU application in Windows I was able to overclock the board to the Turbo setting of 216MHz, an 8% overclock successfully. Manual overclocking resulted in a 13% overclock easily being the best I've seen on the AM2 platform.

BIOS