Abit KV8-MAX3 (VIA K8T800) Motherboard Review
BIOS
The BIOS of Abit KV8-MAX3 is based on the Award BIOS version.
The company engineers have always been considerate to the "fine" settings. At that, the board is no exception.
The user gets a number of parameters to tune the memory operation settings ("Bank Interleave", "CAS Latency", "Precharge to Active"(Trp), "Active to precharge" (Tras) è "Active to CMD"(Trcd)), as well as several additional. In this section, there is also a parameter in charge of selecting the memory operating frequency.
By now, the "Game Accelerator" technology (or the like) simplifying the tuning of latency timings.
On the other hand, the user gets a very handy feature for saving the BIOS settings as profiles. Up to 5 profiles stored in memory of the mGuru chip are available.
To store a profile, the F6 key is used, and F7 for loading it.
There is a separate section to deal with tuning the HyperTransport bus operation.
Now move on to the section to do with the system monitoring.
All the parameters are partitioned into four groups, the first containing the information on the temperature of the processor, system and power supply module.
Besides, it is possible to install an alarm on overheating and enable the forced system power-off upon attaining a certain temperature. By the way, the hardware protection against overheating is always on and activates once the processor temperature exceeds 100 C.
The next section deals with monitoring the voltage levels.
As we already noted, Abit KV8-MAX3 keeps track of the rotational speed of all the five coolers which may be plugged in.
Starting with version 18 of the BIOS, there have appeared the CPUFAN item responsible for disabling the alarm on low rotational speed (this will be of interest to owners of water-cooled systems or nonstandard coolers).
Finally, a very interesting section FanEQ where the user can set the dependence of fan speed on the temperatures of the processor, system and power supply module.
In fact, at the control over the fans our board is unmatched. As regards support for the Cool'n'Quiet technology, Abit KV8-MAX3 does offer it. To monitor the system condition from within Windows, there is the Abit EQ utility.
Now let's look at the utility for BIOS update running under Windows operating system.
FlashMenu includes a standard set of options: independent connection to Abit website, downloading and flashing the BIOS, saving the old version.
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