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While the DFI
LANParty motherboard certainly has its finer points, the
ABIT AN7 isn't holding anything back either. As you'll
see in a second, ABIT has a few of its own tricks to show
off.
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Abit
AN7: A Closer Look |
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My
BIOS is Smarter Than Yours |
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Click
images for full view
The ABIT AN7
motherboard is not as over the top as the DFI LANParty, but
at the same time still delivers a solid package. The
bundle of this motherboard is a bit lacking as only SATA,
EIDE, and FDD cables were included. There is no rear
USB bracket or any other bracket for that matter. It's
obvious ABIT is aiming at more a of "mainstream" price point
with the AN7. The motherboard itself is a typical
nForce2 Ultra motherboard. There are two SATA
connectors and a Silicon Image controller offering RAID 0 or
RAID 1. The Realtek RTL8201BL LAN controller offers
10/100 LAN capabilities. On board sound is created
with the ALC650 codec chip, which has the option for up to 6
speakers in either analog or optical S/PDIF connections.
The NVIDIA "SoundStorm" technology on board sound is very
impressive and will save the user the expense of having to
add in a sound card. The biggest selling point of this
motherboard is ABIT's "ųGuru" technology, which is described
as a "second processor" used to monitor the system vitals as
well as make overclocking from the BIOS as thing of the
past. The ųGuru
chip allows for real time overclocking from within the
operating system itself. We'll get into more detail
with that in a second, but first let's mention a few things
about the layout of this motherboard.
The layout of
the ABIT AN7 creates a few small problems. The power
connectors are placed right behind the back I/O panel of the
motherboard which will make wire management difficult as the
wires will have to pass back over the heatsink and down
around it to be plugged in. The CPU socket area is
wide open and our Thermaltake Volcano 11+ had no problems
fitting onto this motherboard. The DIMM slot locations
will cause a problem for longer video cards, as memory
modules won't be changeable without the video card being
removed. Finally the EIDE connectors are at the very
bottom, right hand side of this motherboard. While
this will not cause any problems for smaller to mid-sized
cases, all those using larger full-sized towers will need
longer cables to reach these connectors. None of these
anomalies will make the motherboard impossible to use, but
at the very least may cause a few headaches. After
getting everything hooked up we took the liberty of
capturing some BIOS screens for you. Let's have a
look.
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Abit AN7 BIOS Setup |
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AwardBIOS and UGuru |
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Click
images for full view
ABIT chose the
Phoenix AwardBIOS for the AN7 motherboard. As is
typical of most ABIT motherboards, the BIOS is extremely
tweakable and offers many features which will draw the
attention of enthusiasts. The Advanced Chipset screen
allows the timings of the RAM to be set and is perfect for
locking in those aggressive settings. The SoftMenu
screen is where we'll find all of the other important
settings. One aspect you will notice is the sentence
at the bottom that reads "Press F8 to OC on the Fly".
Doing this allows you to take advantage of the ųGuru
processor and overclock within the operating system.
Pressing F8 here simply enables the overclocking on the fly,
but settings are still adjustable within in the BIOS itself
at this point. The front side bus is adjustable from
100 MHz to 300 MHz in 1 MHz increments. The AGP clock
can be changed from 66 to 99 MHz by keying in the
appropriate integer value. Unlocked Athlon processors
can take advantage of the many different multipliers offered
in the BIOS. The DRAM ratios are also quite expansive
with selections such as 3:3, 4:3, 4:5 and many more.
Moving along to the voltage front, the CPU core voltage is
adjustable all the way up to 2.313V! This is very
impressive, but at the same time you should have some
hardcore cooling set up if you're going to be pumping 2.313V
into your CPU, even then you should tread very lightly with
these voltage levels. The DRAM voltage is just as
impressive allowing a setting up to 3.2V. The AGP and
chipset voltages are also editable with up to four choices a
piece. Comparing BIOS's, the DFI LANParty and ABIT AN7
both offer an excess of options and are very impressive to
say the least.
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Here are a few
screens from the front end of the ųGuru processor software.
On the far left is the ABIT EQ which monitors all system
vitals including voltages, fan speeds and temperatures.
The next two screens are the ones used to overclock on the
fly and are a bit limited in what you can adjust.
There are two tabs at the top of the screen which read F1
and Turbo. The Turbo mode screen only allows for
adjustments to the front side bus, while the F1 mode screen
allows for front side bus changes as well as CPU, AGP, and
DRAM voltages. Sliding the bar for the the front side
bus triggers a screen warning of the possible system crashes
that may occur when overclocking. Clicking OK will set
the front side bus to the specific speed selected.
Also in here is the ability to load and save different
profiles, which is a very nice feature, similar to DFI's
CMOS Reloaded. This is great for gaming instances when
you want to overclock the system, you can simply load a
pre-saved profile and off you go. We liked what we saw
from the ABIT ųGuru, but found we were a bit more successful
overclocking the motherboard from within the BIOS rather
than using the software. There may be some future
tweaking required by Abit for this software utility but it
worked as we expected it to over all and was a certainly a
welcomed enhancement over traditional overclocking methods
driven before boot up.
As you can see
we have a couple impressive motherboards on the test bench
here, so let's get cracking on some benchmarks.
Test
Setup, Overclocking and Initial Numbers |