abit AW9D-Max Motherboard Review :: BIOS and Overclocking

abit used the Phoenix-AwardBIOS that is common to many motherboards on the market today with a few differences. The Advanced Chipset page of the BIOS contains the memory timing options. If you want to tweak your memory, this is where you would change the settings from the default ones that SPD detects.

The main overclocking area of the BIOS is in the uGURU page. Here you can set your FSB, the CPU mulitplier, the memory frequency, the voltages for the CPU and memory, and the fan and temperature readings of the system, telling you if your system is overheating or if one of the fans fails.

The FSB on the motherboard can be set from 133MHz to 600MHz in 1MHz increments. The multiplier can be set from 14x to 60x. Note that neither the FSB nor the muliplier will likely be able to set to maximum, as that is just crazy overclocking. The PCI Express frequency can be set from 100 to 200MHz in 1 MHz increments. CPU voltage can be set from 1.3625V to 1.7125V in 0.025V increments. Memory voltage can be set from 1.75V to 2.65V in 0.05 increments. The MCH voltage can be set from 1.50V to 2.00V in 0.010V increements.

One problem occurred when trying to overclock this board. uGuru seemed to give an error and the system would not overclock with any of the pre-sets of Normal, Turbo or the user pre-sets. I was unable to overclock the system without the system hanging on the next POST. As abit boards usually overclock pretty well, I attribute it to an error with the uGuru chip, as launching the uGuru application often gave me an error.

BIOS