With the 5-bit FID Override technology and Abit’s Soft Menu III overclocking couldn’t be easier. There is no need to open up your case and mess with jumpers or DIP switches because all of the settings that you would ever want to change are in the BIOS.
The way I always overclock is to get the highest possible FSB while keeping my system stable and increasing the overall speed of my CPU in Mhz. The first thing I did was change the multiplier just to see if it would unlock and it did. I was able to change the multiplier up and down without a problem. The 5-bit FID Override technology is great and will save you a lot of time and effort from physically unlocking your CPU. After increasing the FSB slowly
I finally maxed out at 215MHz which is amazing. I love how I was able to change the CPU FSB/DRAM ratio and AGP frequency, if these options were not available the overclock would have been a lot lower because my RAM and video card would have maxed out. If I had lowered the speed of RAM I probably could have gotten more out of this board but then the RAM would have been running slower.
To achieve this overclock I had to increase the CPU core to 1.75v, the DDR voltage to 2.9v, and the chipset voltage to 1.7v. I have a watercooling kit from Danger Den which allowed me to overclock better by cooling the CPU which was running hotter than normal because of the higher voltage. I will have a review on the watercooling kit later, however if you do not have watercooling be careful while changing the voltage settings. Below is a screenshot of everything changed in the Soft Menu III section which resulted in this overclock.
Conclusion
This was my first real experience with an Abit motherboard and I couldn’t be happier with it. Not only does it have a ton of features such as USB 2.0, SATA, dual channel DDR, onboard LAN, firewire, and sound but it performs really well. The BIOS allows you to change the multiplier, FSB, CPU/DRAM ratio, AGP frequency, voltages, DRAM timings, and tons of other things that many other boards do not.
There was nothing that I could find wrong with the layout, BIOS, features, or anything at all. Overall I am going to give this motherboard a 10/10 and awarding it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank Abit for sending me this motherboard to review.
Pros
- Incrediable overclocking ability
- 5-bit FID Override technology
- Tons of memory tweaking options
- Vcore up to 2.00v
- 6-Channel AC 97 CODEC
- Serial ATA capable of RAID
- Onboard LAN
- 6 USB 2.0 ports
- AGP 8x
- Onboard IEEE 1394a
- Lots of thermal compound on the northbridge
- SATA adapter and cable included
Cons
- None
