Abit Fatality AN9 32X nForce 590 SLI Motherboard

The Fatality AN9 32X motherboard is equipped with a Phoenix BIOS, which has been styled red (rather than the standard blue) to coincide with theme of the product. As one would expect from a motherboard targeted at gamers and enthusiasts, Abit gives users control over nearly every detail of their motherboard configuration, including control over multipliers, bus speeds, and voltage levels. Abit allows for vCore up to 2.125V, DDR2 up to 2.3V, along with voltage controls for Northbridge, Southbridge, HyperTransport, and PCI Express. 

Main BIOS Screen

DRAM Timing Menu

The majority of these controls are located in the Abit uGuru menu, which acts as a central housing for most (not all) of the major tweaking controls. Not only can you adjust speeds and voltage levels here, but under the Abit EQ menu, you can also control fan speeds, monitor temperature levels and voltage levels. Abit allows for fan speed control over every fan header, which is certainly an attractive feature for those who are interested in silence. Abit's automatic fan speed modes work quite well too, keeping thermals under control while providing a very low noise environment. 

OCGuru BIOS Menu

Abit EQ BIOS Menu

Abit also has a Windows-based GUI utility to interface with the motherboard, providing roughly the same amount of controls as the BIOS directly. From the uGuru utility, you can change fan speed settings and overclock your system on the fly. However, Abit's utility isn't incredibly user friendly and overclocking on the fly is always a tad riskier compared to BIOS level overclocking. The utility is quite useful for monitoring temperatures, however. Using Abit's utilities, we were able to overclock our Athlon64 X2 3800+ (2.0 GHz) processor up to 2.5 GHz clock speeds by cranking up the bus speed up to 250 MHz. This represents a 25% overclock with minimal work and air-cooling, so we're pleased with these results. 

Overclocked @ 2.5 GHz

uGuru Windows utility