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| ABIT KV8 MAX3 Taking it to the streets | |
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(Review by MS, November 24, 2003) |
| KV8 MAX3 At: |
BIOS
ABIT uses the same Phoenix Award BIOS v6.00PG for the KV8 MAX3 that is used for all other ABIT boards. For the most part, the layout is rather plebejan in the positive sense of the word, that is, without any real surprises. The first submenu, as usual, is the "Abit SoftMenu", however, without the III moniker in this case, followed by the "standard CMOS Features, the Advanced BIOS features, the Advanced Chipset Features and so on, we have all seen those a million times.
The softmenu allows changing of the external CPU clock and then shows the resulting AGP and South Bridge base frequencies with the AGP being 1/3 of the external CPU frequency. The resulting system frequencies are shown in the "CPU FSB Clock (MHz)", however, it appears that this is a cut and paste job from some other BIOS versions, there is no FSB and the secondary PCI bus is locked to 33MHz anyway. Things get even more curious when 233 MHz or above are selected, in this case, the AGP frequency and its ˝ value fall back to 66/33 MHz. Unfortunately, it does not work. We had no problems whatsoever to get the system into Windows at 232 MHz, even at an alleged "PCI" frequency of 41 MHz, however, adding a single MHz to the external CPU clock (with the resulting ratio changes) caused the system to turn on all blinking lights and sirens without doing anything else. What this appears to come down to is that the BIOS tries to force a divider (2/7) that (as far as we know) is not allowed by the chipset at all and that causes the system failure.
The next entry concerns the multiplier factor. In case a multiplier-locked CPU is used, the setting is displayed in blue instead of white, if an unlocked CPU is used, the entry turns into white and can be changed, however, the changer does not work. That is, the same CPU that could be changed on the ASUS K8V Deluxe only allowed one single setting on the KV8 MAX, that is 10 x, all other settings were ignored.
The remaining entries in the SoftMenu are only relating to voltage changes with the CPU Vre allowing overvoltage specification of up to 350 mV over VID, the AGP I/O buffers (AGP Vddq) showing a range from 1.5 to 1.65 V (we still recommend to stick with a maximum of 1.55V).*
The DDR voltage can be increased from 2.5 to 3.05V and once again, this setting only falls into the category of "we do it because we can do it" without any practical value. Most halfway-decent memory modules will run up to 220 MHz at reasonable voltages. At that point, the memory controller on the CPU starts to meet its maker anyway and there is no reason to add extra hardship by increasing the memory voltage and, concomitantly, the heat and load on the memory subsystem.
At the bottom of the page is one rather cryptic entry saying "Press F8 to OC on the fly". We tried it and the result, after going through a few "press Y" was exactly nothing.
*there is a general misconception regarding the AGP voltage, we keep reading that if the AGP voltage is increased, some "weaker" graphics cards will function better ... Anything like that appears to belong into the realm of fairytales, all the Vddq does is to juice up the AGP I/O buffers on the chipset with the primary result of the chipset running hotter.
Most of the settings of interest for the overclocker community are found in the advanced chipset menu:
The main focus here is on the DRAM performance parameters and in good tradition, the ABIT CMOS setup utility allows setting of all parameters offered by VIA under the general umbrella of "user-definable". Detailed explanations of the function of the individual parameters are found here!
| DRAM Configuration | AGP & P2P Control | ||
| DRAM Timing Selectable [Manual - By SPD] | [Manual] | AGP Aperture Size | [128 MB] |
| DRAM Clock [DDR 200 - DDR400] | [DDR400] | AGP Driving Control | [Auto / 9b] |
| CAS Latency Time [2.0, 2.5, 3.0 Clocks] | [2] | AGP Fast Write | [Enabled] |
| Row Cycle Time [7 - 22 Clocks] | [10] | AGP Master 1 WS Write | [Enabled] |
| Row Refresh Cycle Time [9 - 24 Clocks] | [10] | AGP Master 1 WS Read | [Enabled] |
| RAS# to CAS# Delay [2 - 7 Clocks] | [3] | LTD & PCI Bus Control | |
| RAS# to RAS Delay [2 - 4 Clocks] | [2] | Upstream LTD Bus Width | [16 bit] |
| Min RAS# Active Time [5 - 15 Clocks] | [7] | Downstream LTD Bus Width | [16 bit] |
| RAS# Precharge Time [2 - 6 Clocks] | [2] | LTD Bus Frequency | [800 MHz] |
| Write Recovery Time [2 - 3 Clocks] | [3] | PCI1 Master 0 WS Write | [Enabled] |
| Write to Read Delay [1 - 2 Clocks] | [2] | PCI2 Master 0 WS Write | [Enabled] |
| Read to Write Delay [1 - 6 Clocks] | [3] | PCI1 POST Write | [Enabled] |
| PCI2 POST Write | [Enabled] |
(the settings we found for best stability and performance are given in red)
* the default is "Disabled" which forces 2 cycles of additional wait states. Selecting "Enabled" will allow to run with a single penalty cycle on both reads and writes and boost the performance quite a bit. For example, in Comanche4, we gained 2 FPS on average (~ 3% performance increase) only by setting both wait states to 1 (Enabled). When overclocking, the settings may have to be reset to 2T (Disabled)
Most of the other settings in the BIOS are self-explanatory, the most interesting part being the Heath Status page being subdivided into Temperature / Voltage / Fan Speed / FanEQ submenues that don't need much further explanations.
next page: => Test Configuration =>
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