Abit IN9 32X-MAX Bios

After installing the IN9 in our case we added in the components for this review, it was a trouble free experience and we were soon up and running. Next stop, the BIOS.

As shown above Abit have chosen to use AwardBIOS for the IN9 32X-Max. For those who have used any Abit product recently it will be familiar and as expected, highly configurable. For the enthusiast who needs to know every statistic about the product Abit have included Abit EQ, a section of the BIOS which shows every voltage reading imaginable as well as fan speeds and temperatures. In addition to this many of the entries can be configured to send out warnings when user thresholds are crossed and fans can be easily configured. The final part of this BIOS area is the ability to enable or disable the under-board LED's which light up in various patterns when the board is turned on. Before we look at the BIOS in detail there was one issue which became apparent to us when first configuring the board. If changing a large number of settings at one time the board would randomly reboot when loading Windows. The simple solution is to make smaller groups of changes before booting. Hopefully this will be fixed in updated BIOS files.

The fan and voltage monitoring section of the BIOS is great, and very useful however it’s the OC Guru section which we find most interesting. The IN9 32X-MAX is clearly aimed at enthusiasts and it is this section which allows us to unlock all of the potential of the board. As with all 680i boards we have looked at there is the great option to unlink the memory speed from the CPU. On older motherboards as the FSB/CPU speed is overclocked so is the Memory however 680i allows the memory to be set independently from the FSB/CPU allowing for more specific overclocking of the components within the system. The usual memory ratios are included for selection as is the less used 1333strap. The option to overclock the PCIe slots is also included.

Further configuration of the BIOS for enthusiast users comes on the form of Voltage control and memory timings. The board fully supports SLI/EPP memory for ease of set-up however advanced users can change the timings manually if required. Voltage levels available are exceptional on the IN9 with CPU voltage available up to (an insane and potential chip destroying) 1.95v and memory setting of 3.0v.

The final useful and worthwhile options in the BIOS come in the form of profiles. The first board we found Abit’s profiles to be useful on was the AW9-MAX and it’s great to see option here again. The basic outline is that on the majority of motherboards you have two configuration options. Default (used when the board first boots or CMOS is cleared) and User where the end user sets up the board to their liking. These user settings are completely lost when the CMOS is reset. On Abit's IN9 32x-MAX there is the option to save several user settings which can be loaded as required. For example, We had a setting for stock speeds, one for a light overclock of memory and CPU and one for maximum overclock of CPU. Depending on the tasks being performed on the PC we entered the BIOS and 4 button presses later the PC was booting with the desired profile. The feature is especially useful when determining the maximum overclock of each setting because these profiles are not deleted when the CMOS is reset meaning that if we went a step too far rather than have to start from scratch on BIOS settings we just reset, selected the last profile used and continued on.