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The BIOS is beyond any doubt, the most integral portion of any motherboard. Some are awash in features and tweaks, whilst others are so painfully frustrating, you just want to cry. Now in reference to the Fatal1ty AN9 32X BIOS, I could go nuts and spend an obscene amount of time detailing every single aspect of this BIOS. In the interest of saving time (and bandwidth), I'll simply be pointing out those defining aspects of this particular boards BIOS. If there's something interesting, you'll see it. If it's something old, I'll just tell you about it. So lets take a look.
I guess the first thing to decide upon with the Fatal1ty is whether to go with a graphical boot screen or the more traditional, slightly more sophisticated verbose brand. You decide.
Now that we've gotten past that part, we find ourselves at the BIOS intro screen. Abit chose to use the Phoenix Award BIOS system over the American Megatrends AMI style. Either would have worked, but I have found the navigation and layout style of the Phoenix Award system to be a little more user friendly than the AMI equivalent. But personal preference aside, doesn't the white text against the red background look sweet? I am kinda tired of the traditional blue and white.
Standard CMOS Features are pretty much standard in this case. Just decide the date and time and your drive configurations and your done. Advanced BIOS features haven't changed either, just choose your boot device priority, security options, and a couple other little (and mostly pointless) things. Pointless in the sense that they won't affect system performance in any real way.
But the Advanced Chipset Features are something worth looking at. Voltage settings for the North and South Bridge, reference speeds and the sort, all important to the enthusiast overclocker. But perhaps the most exciting portion of the advanced chipset features would be what I found in the DRAM Configuration menu. There's more settings here than I ever thought possible. Having such a slew of memory tweaks should come in quite handy during the overclocking stage.
Integrated Peripherals is just those rear I/Os like LAN and USB and audio. Nothing too special here. Power Management Setup is pretty bland too. Wake on LAN and stuff like that. PnP/PCI Configuration for graphics and expansion card tweaks is for the most part, useless. We need not concern ourselves with PCI Express Payload Sizes and Palette Snooping. These features won't make much of any difference in the day to day usage of an assembled Fatal1ty board. Fail-Safe and Optimized Defaults loading are old school and come standard with every board (or at least I would hope).
Now there are two sections where my eyes did widen in fascination, just a little. The first of those being the µGuru Utility.
As you can see, the µGuru OC Guru Utility is an overclockers central control unit. As we run through the list, we have CPU Multipliers ranging from 4.0 up to 13.0 in whole number increments. Our FSB range is any whole figure between 200 and 400 MHz, quite a sweep. CPU VCore voltages run from 1.3000 V to 2.0750 V in .0250 V steps. Very nice for when you want to crank out some extra cycles. The DDR2 Voltage runs from 1.75 V to 2.30 V in tiny .05 V steps. North Bridge Voltage is 1.20 V to 1.50 V in those little .05 V steps, while the South Bridge starts at 1.50 V and ends at 2.00 V with the same .05 V steps. The HyperTransport is a little less forgiving with just four settings that start with 1.20 V and ends with 1.35 V in .05 V steppings. And finally, the DDR2 Reference Voltage allows you to adjust the juice up or down 60 mV in 10mV steps. So, I'd say there's more than enough head room for overclocking the Fatal1ty. There's gonna be a whole lotta tweakin' goin' on!
And in case your wondering about the Power Cycle Statistics menu, that's just a little electronic diary that keeps tabs of your computers up time. Stuff like how many total hours it's run so far, how many times you've poked the power button, and stuff like that. Probably only useful if you'd like to see if someones been playing on your rig while your sound asleep.
We also have within the µGuru Utility our Abit EQ. I could show you every single screen within, but that would take some extended measure of time. But quite simply put, it just an advanced PC Health Status Monitor. It's here you'll find temperature and voltage readings. There's the Fan Speed Monitoring too. But to be honest, it's nothing I haven't seen a million times before. The only real benefit to it in the Fatal1tys case is the fact that all of the information provided is quite extensive and very well laid out.
And finally, there one the one feature within the Fatal1ty BIOS that really impressed me. I've seen this quite a bit with Asus EZFlash, and it's one of the greatest features any BIOS could ever have. By hitting F6, you can save all your settings to the CMOS. If you want to load them up again, just hit F7 and make your choice. Having these saved profiles (which don't disappear when you flash to a new BIOS or clear the CMOS) is a life saver. Regardless of whatever horrors you may inflict upon your system, you'll always be able to recover to a stable state with the push of a button. This is thanks to that µGuru chip Abit tacked onto the motherboard, allowing for some smooth overclocks, saved BIOS profiles, and the desktop overclocking feature through the µGuru Utility.
All in all, this BIOS is perhaps one of the nicest I've ever seen. I know I said that pretty much every BIOS is identical, but the Fatal1ty BIOS just seems a little more polished than most. Abit has really pulled out all the stops for this board. I think it's about time we loaded some benchmarks onto this hardware and see what it can do. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Fatal1ty will probably be a high performance part. Let's get to it.