BIOS Support
We have been emailed several times with people having problems with the installation of the board - this is an outline of the best way to do it - we have tried a couple of different ways:
-Load the latest VIA drivers
-Load the latest Motherboard BIOS
-If your AGP graphics card is causing instability, see the AGP section in the manual - be aware that the AGP slot shares an interrupt request with PCI slot 1, so try moving any card out of PCI slot 1 firstly.
-Sound card problems can often be resolved by enabling the 15-16 MB memory hole in the BIOS.
-Note that the BIOS section of the manual clearly states that the onboard hardware monitor uses I/O addresses 294H to 297H. If you have an add-on card that uses these addresses you must select new I/O addresses for the add-on card. This can be set under System Properties -> Device Manager -> Properties -> Resources.
-Try raising the core voltage and I/O voltage by one notch in the CPU power supply section of Soft Menu III in the BIOS if you're having stability problems.
When you look at the motherboard, unlike several other Socket A / Socket 370 boards, there seems to be a lot of space around the CPU socket. ABIT seems to have shifted all of the bits and bobs like capacitors to make a lot of space around the Socket A interface. It appears to me that they have thought of the overclockers out there who want to run their CPU at the maximum possible speed and therefore would be needing a large CPU cooler to do so! But, I tried to fit a PEP66 to my board and there was no way of doing it - it was a little too big, but once I get the required modification done for my Vapochill unit sitting here then that will be sitting on this motherboard very nicely instead!
Overclocking on this board is very good and quite simple to carry out due to all of the tweaking options being availble (as we are used to on all ABIT motherboards) within the BIOS - no jumper worries these days! I managed to get a 1GHz TBird to boot windows at 1.2Ghz, but then it crashed :( This problem could be solved with better cooling however. General overclocked stability was excellent though.
On to the more important stuff - ABIT's motherboards are well known for the very good BIOS’s that they have and this one is no exception. There is full control over overclocking ability and settings, especially if your CPU is unlocked, but if it isn’t then you can always join up all of the pins on L1 bridge to make it multiplier unlocked (various guides on the web showing how to do this) meaning you get to play with many multiplier/FSB combinations! This seems to be a key selling point of AMD's Socket A CPU's (if they are multiplier unlocked or not) and I hope they don’t shoot themselves in the foot by not keeping this feature rolling as there has been talk about AMD removing pins from the CPU that mean you cannot adjust multipliers regardless of if the L1 bridges on the CPU are connected or not. In the BIOS you can't change the latency of the L2 cache, but why would you want to do this as you would then be downgrading your CPU if you lowered it and getting nearer performance to a Celeron II which is the Duron's main rival - which it outperforms nicely already! Hehe :) As usual ABIT have opted for a 'no jumpers' approach and they have used their Softmenu III BIOS which itself won't unlock the multiplier of the Socket A CPU but it will allow multiplier manipulation on unlocked CPU's as well as all of the other tweaking features such as playing with memory speeds/timings, adjusting the FSB from 100Mhz right the way up to 155, playing with voltages and much more. Also, you can use different 'asynchronous' memory speeds in relation to the chosen FSB as you can set the clockspeed of the system memory by using Host + PCI (i.e. 100MHz FSB, 133MHz memory) and Host - PCI (i.e. 133MHz FSB and 100MHz memory) and also Host on its own (meaning the FSB and memory speeds are the same). So, there is no real need to upgrade your memory with this motherboard! Another cool feature of this board is the ability to adjust voltages - you can change VCore and also the I/O voltage. The I/O voltage, for example, would need to be increased if you're having problems with system stability and you think it may be linked to your AGP video card. Or also, if you are playing around with trying to get stability at a higher FSB, or maybe your GeForce GTS shows image tearing in games - this is the link to the solution. Just push the voltage up here! The VCore, which I haven’t had a need to play around with much, can be pushed up in tiny amounts to increase CPU stability as you push your CPU speed higher!
New BIOS: The Beta BIOS 'UL102' is currently the most recent BIOS for this motherboard. This beta BIOS is available at ftp://ftp.ABIT.com.tw/pub/beta/kt7/BIOS/ktul102.zip. This BIOS revision also contains an upgrade to the latest Highpoint controller BIOS for the KT7-RAID *only!* Changes in the Highpoint 1.02 BIOS include:
Change PIO timing setting again
Fix problems on BBS
Add supporting STD mode, which is for Award BIOS only
Add command retry for error status to reduce reset bus
Fix compatibility issues with Maxtor ATA-100 disks
