AA8 DuraMAX

ABIT AA8-DuraMAX

With ABIT’s long tradition of providing boards tailor made for hardware enthusiasts and gamers, it’s no surprise to see that their AA8-DuraMAX is one of a handful of 925X motherboards that circumvents Intel’s latest clock lock, they do after all, have one of the best BIOS teams in the business.

For enhanced cooling, ABIT has brought back their overclocking strips, which flank the top and left half of the LGA 775 CPU socket. ABIT has also revised their OTES North Bridge cooling, OTES AeroFlow has been designed to not only cool the North Bridge, but also supply air to the graphics card and surrounding components.

OC Strips are back!

Active North Bridge cooling

One additional feature ABIT will be providing for the AA8-DuraMAX is their 3rd Eye Technology. 3rd Eye is an external add-on module that provides hardware monitoring and overclocking, in addition, 3rd Eye can even be used to turn on your system or notify you when you receive new email/MSN! The unit sits on your desk, so you don’t have to look under your desk to see your system temperatures or overclock the processor. We saw a working prototype at Computex and came away highly impressed.

ABIT 3rd Eye module

Adjusting CPU parameters

BIOS Main Menu

ABIT’s AA8 BIOS provides everything you’d need to overclock your shiny new LGA-775 Pentium 4 processor. FSB options range from 200-300MHz in 1MHz increments. Since the memory bus and front-side bus operate asynchronously on 925X, you can adjust the memory multiplier accordingly. Memory options of 400MHz and 533MHz are available for DDR2, the PCI Express clock can also be adjusted. For PCI Express, ABIT provides clock speeds between 50MHz-255MHz in 1MHz increments, the most of any 925X motherboard we’ve seen. And for those of you with cards that are sensitive to PCI bus frequency, such as older SCSI cards, the AA8-DuraMAX also provides PCI bus speed adjustment, 33MHz, 36MHz, and 40MHz settings are included.

Lots of FSB options

CPU voltage settings

PCI Bus settings

In order to reach those high clock speeds, system components such as the processor, memory, and chipset often need a little more juice than the default settings provide. For this ABIT equips the AA8-DuraMAX with CPU voltage options ranging from 1.3625V-1.7125V in 0.025V increments. DDR2 options are also plentiful, with voltages of 1.8V-2.25V in increments of 0.05V. Finally, ABIT provides lots of options for North Bridge voltage, with settings from 1.5V all the way up to 2.05V again in increments of 0.05V. Also present in the “OC Guru” section of the ABIT BIOS is the power cycle statistics area, which tracks stats such as PC up time and the number of times the system has been reset.

ABIT EQ provides temperature monitoring

Adjusting chipset voltage

Advanced chipset features menu