BIOS
ABIT uses a standard AwardBIOS with a few interesting twists and turns. ABIT used to be the pioneer in user-friendly BIOSes. Now even the likes of MSI offer pretty robust, tweakable BIOSes. ABIT needs to re-invent its SoftMenu if it's to stay one step ahead of the game.
Pretty standard form for ABIT. The board shipped with the A15 BIOS. It was manually flashed to the newest (at the time of writing) A16 BIOS that supposedly cures a number of small faults. That always sounds as if the board was rushed in the first instance. Look right at the bottom of the picture and note how ABIT has essentially a technology that's similar to DFI's CMOS reloaded BIOS saving and loading function. After setting the BIOS up to your personal satisfaction, 5 different configurations can be saved to CMOS (F6) and reloaded via the F7 key. As this particular SoftMenu has more bells and whistles on it than almost any other, that's a pretty good idea. One could be a safe setting, another could be a fully tuned performance one. A useful, value-adding feature.
The beating heart of the KV8's SoftMenu. What we don't like is how the board defaults to a native speed of 204MHz CPU clock (2040MHz overall clock). That's 40MHz above specification and would give the KV8-MAX3 an artificial lead when compared to most other motherboards that run the CPU at the correct frequency. Another issue, although this one has more to do with the chipset than ABIT's implementation, is the non-locking of PCI and AGP buses. Maximum CPU MHz permissible is 300MHz. AGP and PCI clocks are a consistent 1/3 and 1/6 of the CPU clock. So at 300MHz, AGP and PCI speeds are reckoned to be 100MHz and 50MHz respectively. That doesn't bode well for enthusiasts who wish to push their systems to the edge.
Voltages are good. CPU voltage sees up to 0.375v above default, AGP to 0.15v above default and DDR voltage goes up to an impressive 3.2v. Even the HyperTransport bus between the Northbridge and CPU sees voltage adjustment. The CPU's voltage adjustment purports to raise it in 0.01v increments. That seemed a little too fine for us.
As this is a VIA K8T800 board, the HyperTransport link runs at the full 6.4GB/s. Overclocking on the fly was introduced with the AI7's BIOS. It allows the user to change values and for them to have an immediate effect. Voltages and speeds change on the fly. Our sample, though, would very occasionally lock when we attempted to adjust key parameters.
DDR frequency and latency will play in important role in determining overall performance. We're glad to report that ABIT allows the user to exercise complete control over both aspects. DDR frequency can be set to either DDR400, DDR333, DDR266 and DDR200. You can never quite guarantee the memory frequencies for certain speeds. The DRAM memory controller works at a ratio of the CPU's overall clock. We ran with the timings shown above for formal testing.
Another strong facet of this BIOS is its informative hardware monitoring screen. It's geared up towards the enthusiast who likes to know exactly what the system is outputting at any one time. CPU voltage appeared to over-volt by 0.05v consistently. DDR voltage was within 0.02v of what's inputting in the SoftMenu section. Pretty good.
This last shot highlights just how much flexibility is present in ABIT's latest BIOSes. The three main fans' speed can be controlled via voltage adjustment from 8v to the full 12v, all in 0.1v increments. The fans' speed can be raised at preset temperatures. The BIOS also features the usual features' manipulation and power management setup. Overall, it's probably ABIT's best BIOS thus far.
