ABIT AA8 DuraMAX and ASUS P5AD2 Premium- New Alderwoods From The Big Dogs
ABIT's "SoftMenu" BIOS innovation has historically been the watermark by which all other BIOS versions have been measured. Today, ABIT is evangelizing their uGuru (pronounced Micro-Guru) technology as the next big thing for BIOS and windows-driven overclocking and performance optimizations.
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The AA8 DuraMAX BIOS itself has lots of the standard tweaking features we've all gotten used to in enthusiast-type motherboards. CPU FSB and voltage adjustments, memory bus timing divisors and voltage adjustments, and chipset (or in this case "NB" or Northbridge) voltage adjustments, are all present and accounted for. The only real shortcomings we noticed were the relatively few memory divisor settings that are available. The current AA8 BIOS we tested only gives you 1:1 and 3:4 ratios for DDR2 400 and DDR2 533 speed settings. As you'll see next, the ASUS BIOS gives you a 5:6 ratio, which translates to a DDR2 600 speed setting off a 200MHz bus.
Finally, the ABIT AA8 DuraMAX does have a host of health monitoring and control features in their "ABIT EQ" area of the BIOS. These settings should come in handy for users that like to control fan speeds based on heat and load, while quieting things down whenever possible.
ABIT uGuru and EQ Software
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ABIT's uGuru and OC Guru software is a well-refined utility at this point in time, and it gives users excellent control over bus speeds and voltages, all from the comfort of a Windows-based GUI. There are even presets like "Turbo," "Normal," and "Quiet" configured for quick-touch control. As you can see in the above shot, the Turbo setting kicked our 3.4GHz CPU up to 3.74GHz and 1.56V, a 10% boost in overall clock speed.
