BIOS

Like most motherboard companies ABIT uses the Phoenix AwardBios which has been extended by features to control the UGuru chip.


The first page is called Standard CMOS and offers settings to change date/time, HDD and floppy settings.


Advanced BIOS has settings to adjust general BIOS settings like typematic rate and additional bootup-delays. Also you can disable the full screen POST image here, so that you can see the full output of the system startup. On a subpage you can change the order in which the system will try the available boot devices.

Advanced Chipset

Here you find several ATI chipset related options, for example to enable Crossfire. When the Dual Slot setting is set to "single slot", the second PCI-E port will be disabled and the primary one will run at x16. In dual slot mode both slots run at PCI-E x8.


On another subpage you find settings related to the LDT speed and width.
Unlike the nForce4, the LDT frequency is not directly linked to HTT, so if you set 800 MHz here, it stays at 800 MHz, no matter what clock speeds you set for the CPU.

Integrated Peripherals

Integrated Peripherals has options to change, which SATA and IDE ports are activated and to enable/disable USB, Audio, LAN, Floppy and the IEEE1394 interface.


Under Power Management, you will find the standard options which are usually listed here. One important option you can enable/disable here, is "AMD Cool&Quiet" which reduces heat output and power consumption when the CPU is idle.


PNP/PCI Configurations has no useful options, except for "Init Display First" maybe which selects which device will be the primary video card.


A very handy feature is that you can save configuration sets to profiles and load them by pressing a hotkey in the BIOS. The saved profiles will be preserved even through a CMOS reset.

Memory Timings

The options you can pick from are numerous and should cover everything you need. You can select between "Auto", "SPD" and "Manual". When you change to SPD and then to Manual it will first set everything to what is in the SPD and then lets you change them individually.


This is the setting to select between 1T and 2T command rate.


DRAM clock lets you pick the ratio at which your memory runs in comparison to the CPU FSB. Higher dividers to run memory fast than your CPU are available here.