Inside the BIOS

SoftMenu III

SoftMenu has always been a forte of Abit boards, and the BH7 doesn’t disappoint. Everything is included to make your overclocking job hassle free. Looking for 1MHz-step FSB overclocking, PCI/AGP dividers, RAM ratio, DRAM and Vcore voltage adjustments? The BH7 has you well covered. Abit’s BIOS is quite configurable and everything you need to get your hand’s on is organized and well placed. Strangely, we didn’t find a feature that allows configuring of HyperThreading on applicable processors. Hopefully Abit can include this feature in a future BIOS.

Bus speed overclocking

Setting CPU parameters

Lock that PCI bus

Within SoftMenu III, the processor can be automatically defined or manually adjusted by configuring both the FSB and CPU multiplier. It would be a little more helpful if the BIOS showed the resulting frequency as you adjust multiplier or FSB settings dynamically. Right now, you’ll have to multiply things out in your head. Quick! 137x23!

DRAM voltage settings

CPU multiplier adjustment

CPU voltages

If you need a little more juice in your devices, SoftMenu III will allow you to adjust voltages for CPU Vcore, DRAM and AGP. We found it interesting that Vcore is listed in percentages rather than the actual voltage. We prefer that actual voltages are listed and more granularity is given so that we can very carefully tweak our processor without worrying about overdoing something.

Overclocking

Overclocking was straightforward with SoftMenu III and we were able to input our FSB and multiplier values directly. Since our CPU is unlocked, we were able to overclock our CPU to 133FSB x 24 = 3.33GHz without problems. Anything beyond 3.33GHz and the system became quite unstable. Since we’ve determined pretty much how well the CPU is able to scale, it’s now up to the motherboard to show how well it can push the processor, and itself. After a bit of trial and error we managed a stable FSB speed of 160MHz, giving us a final processor speed of about 3.33GHz, inline with what we obtained using multiplier overclocking. This indicated to us that perhaps the limitation lies with the processor we used and not with the BH7. If only we had a more powerful cooling solution.

On another positive note, Abit says that its 4-phase power design allows the use of the new 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 processors. This further indicates that we haven’t yet touched the limits of the BH7’s FSB.