The Phoenix/Award BIOS that Abit uses is just as robust as expected. Softmenu III makes its regular appearance here, of course. You probably know by now that the Athlon XP’s low Front-Side Bus limits the use of memory higher than 266/333, rendering dual channel memory almost useless, and DDR400 would certainly be overkill. Throw in integrated video however, and you get an entirely different story. The on-board video will take whatever speed ram you throw at it, and use it fully (provided that the CPU and GPU can keep up). With the use of various fsb/memory ratios a la P4, ram can run at its own speed, independent of CPU. You may only have a 266FSB CPU, but even Dual Channel DDR400 will not be wasted.
Despite the usual solid Softmenu III, I found a few curious oddities such as high default voltages (VDIMM defaults to 2.6v, which is the lowest setting, and chipset voltage defaults to 1.6v), as well as the lack of an adjustable CMD rate, which is an important performance memory timing, but most importantly, the nForce 2 BIOS sudden death syndrome (not a “curious oddity” here, more like a critical issue). Should you “save changes and exit”, the BIOS runs a risk of corrupting and not working. After such corruption, which I encountered myself on multiple occasions, you can choose to either
“…disconnect the power from the wall outlet, press the power button to discharge all capacitors, reconnect the system while holding down the "Insert Key" on the keyboard and then power up (still holding down the Insert Key). Following this "First Aid" procedure will force the board to POST in safe mode, that is, at 100 MHz FSB which allows to change the FSB setting to workable values.”
…or use the undocumented 100/133 FSB jumper, set to 100FSB, and watch your computer be revived! This problem presented itself with the NF7-M’s shipping BIOS, and future versions as well. Since updating the BIOS to a more recent version (17th Revision), I still infrequently encounter the problem, as well as with the latest BIOS (18th Revision), released a week ago as I write this.
Ram compatibility was also less than perfect. My Mushkin PC3200 Level II Dual Channel kit was rejected by the board , forcing me to use an ancient stick of OCZ PC2700 Rev 3.1 to even make it boot. That was with the shipping BIOS, the 18th revision fixed the incompatibility, and the Mushkin sticks worked fine afterwards. My recommendation would be to update the BIOS as soon as you get the board, as Abit are constantly rolling out vital fixes.
Speaking of which, it is incredibly easy to do. All that needs to be done to update BIOS is to download the appropriate file from the Abit site, extract that to a floppy drive, reboot the computer with floppy loaded, and press “Alt-F2”. The BIOS will then update itself from the floppy. No need to create a bootable disk, nor type in seemingly random lines of /this/that/whatever. All in all, it should take you less than five minutes.
Onboard video can be set to take up anywhere from 8mb to 128mb, with the default being 32mb. If you use an add-in card, say, an ATi Radeon 9800Pro, then the video will automatically turn itself off.
One last gripe - no matter what CPU I put in there, and regardless of jumper setting. The FSB would default to 100FSB. A 1600+ was correctly detected as 1600+, but it still ran at 1050Mhz (10.5x100). Luckily, you can override the settings as if you were overclocking, which you probably will. You’ll first need to “unlock” the overclocking options, by telling the BIOS that you’d like to set the CPU parameters yourself, thank you very much. Voltages need be unlocked in the same way, through a “user define” option.
I hate to say this, but as it stands, the BIOS is pretty bad. Keep your eyes peeled for updates, which come out about once every month.
