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The BIOS
The Abit IC7-G carries the Phoenix AwardBIOS and
features the excellent SoftMenu, which offers some very nice overclocking
features. Let's take a closer look.
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With
the exception of the SoftMenu option, the main menu will look quite similar to
most boards carrying the AwardBIOS. The Advanced BIOS section allows you
to disable/enable Hyper-Threading and provides other familiar options such as
your boot order and offers additional HD boot priority options.
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**click to enlarge** |
The
Advanced Chipset Features menu will be one you would probably be playing with
the most. From here, you can tweak your memory, set your AGP Data
rate and select your Game Accelerator option. So what's all this hype
regarding Game Accelerator? This option is what makes these new Abit boards
perform quite nicely in most cases. Game Accelerator basically allows
you to tweak your memory even further, offering a significant increase in
overall system performance and benchmarks scores. Options available are
Auto (default), Turbo, Street Racer and F1. Note that all DDR memory
modules will not be able to support the higher settings like Street Racer and F1.
In fact, you will need high quality, high performance memory in order to take
advantage of these two settings.
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The
Integrated Peripherals menu will allow you to enable/disable any of the
onboard features such as Audio and LAN. You'll also have additional
options for your SATA setup.
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**click to enlarge** |
The
Firewire and SATA Controller can be disabled if you won't be using them.
Power Management features include common options such as Power Button function
and Wake options.
Overclocking
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The Abit IC7-G offers some excellent
overclocking features thanks to its SoftMenu. It offers plenty to
satisfy even the most hardcore overclocker. SoftMenu was basically designed to
make overclocking easier. The user doesn't have to worry about jumpers
on the motherboard and it provides everything you need to achieve the best
possible overclock. FSB can be set between 100FSB to an outrageously
high 412FSB. CPU:DRAM ratio can be set to either 1:1, 3:2 or 5:4.
N/B Strap setting usually is used to determine the memory speed based on the
processors FSB. The options available are By CPU, PSB400, PSB533, PSB667
and PSB800. You normally would change this according to the CPU you will
be installing or whether or not you will be overclocking. In our tests,
we will be leaving it at its default setting since we will be overclocking.
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