ABIT AN8 32X SLI Motherboard Review

The ABIT AN8 32X BIOS

Abit has always had one of my favorite bios. I have always felt that they were well laid out and easy to navigate. Most of the Abit boards that I have worked with have had a wide range of features and options included in the bios from which to tune your board to your exact liking, this board is no exception. There is not alot of fanfare or new features found in the bios that differ from other ABIT bios on the AN8-32X, but let’s look at a few of the more interesting aspects of the bios.

The Advanced Bios Features page gives us the basic options of boot device order as well as to show the pretty Full Logo screen as the computer starts up. The all-important “number lock” is on this page as well!

Under that Advanced Chipset Features we do find something a little unusual. This is where you will set your HT speed multiplier (1x-5x), which is not anything out of the ordinary, but you also have the ability to control the HT speed between the northbridge and southbridge (1x-5x) as well as the speeds for the reverse – the southbridge to the northbridge (1x-5x). On this page we also find the DRAM Configuration:

As you can see, there are plenty of areas for tweaking. Not as many as the DFI Expert board, but more than enough for the everyday overlocker. The available dividers are : AUTO, 200, 266, 333, 400, 433, 466, 500.

The Integrated Peripherals page gives you control over the setup of your USB, onboard audio, LAN, Firewire, FDD and the Sil SATA controller. You also can set your RAID options here, using either IDE, SATA, or a combination of both types of drives.

Under the ABIT EQ page you find the Fan EQ, where you set control for your fans. This comes in very handy if you are trying to keep a quiet system!

Also under the ABIT EQ page is where we find the temperature, voltage and fan speed monitoring. Take a look at the voltage and temp pages:

One last, and very important page is the ABIT OC GURU page…

Here, we find some of the more necessary settings for our overclocking adventures. The CPU multiplier, HTT clock, PCIE clock and voltage control over the CPU and DDR are all very nice. On thing that is conspicuously absent is the control the chipset voltage. That is something that we will talk about in the overclocking portion of this review. ABIT gives us the following ranges: CPU clock: 200-400; PCIE Clock: 100-145; CPU voltage: default, 1.4v-1.8v; and DDR voltage: 2.5v-3.2v. There is also DDR Reference Voltage control, the range goes from -60mv to +60mv.