ABIT KV7 - ABIT KV7
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KV7
BIOS Features
Okay, I've assembled the motherboard with the following parts:
The first order of business upon booting up was to replace the initial production BIOS that came with the motherboard. So a quick trip to the ABIT website for a download of the latest BIOS and flash utility was in order. Now let me state right now that I was disappointed that ABIT put their FlashMenu™ logo on the back of the box advertising that it can be used to upgrade your BIOS more easily. Heck, they even have it listed on their website. They state on their website that the KV7 is supported but the motherboard manual specifically states that you must do a manual BIOS update.
However, once you download the FlashMenu™ program and run it, you get this ugly little announcement. Funny but this motherboard is running a Phoenix-Award BIOS if I'm not mistaken. So why doesn't the program work as advertised?
So, it's back to doing things the old fashioned way. Get a bootable floppy and get to work. Download the version 1.1 BIOS, copy it to the floppy. Cross your fingers, and Voila' you're done.
original BIOS | 
KV7_1.0 |
(BIOS flash program)
new BIOS | 
KV7_1.1 |
Okay, now that we are up to date, we see the standard Phoenix BIOS options screen. The first option in the list is the SoftMenu which gives you all your software based tweaking options. You can go with the option to pick a predefined CPU setting or you can go the more entertaining route of "user defined".
(SoftMenu) | 
(CPU Speed) |
By choosing to "do your own thing" you can choose from 100 to 250MHz CPU FSB settings. The area where you get gypped is in the ratio options for the FSB/AGP/PCI settings. You only get four choices which severely limit your overclocking abilities. At the max setting of 6:2:1, you will start to severely freak out your AGP bus as you crank up your FSB past 200MHz. Setting your FSB to the max of 250MHz would result in an AGP bus clock of 83.3MHz which was more than high enough to completely lock up my Radeon 9700Pro. Next, you can select from a x5 to a x22.5 clock multiplier for the CPU. The CPU voltage range is pretty good going from 1.275 to 2.325 volts. DDR voltage options range from 2.5 to 2.8 volts in .1 volt increments. The AGP voltage selections are about average going from 1.5 to 1.65 volts. ABIT does give you the opportunity to burn some stuff up with a voltage selection for the Northbridge from 2.55 to 2.95 volts. None of these voltage options will overly excite extreme overclockers except for the Northbridge and CPU limits.
| | 
(CPU FSB) | |
(FSB/AGP/PCI) | 
(Clock Multiplier) | 
(CPU Core Volt) |
(DDR Voltage) | 
(AGP Voltage) | 
(NB Voltage) |
There are only a couple notable things in the Advanced BIOS settings screens. Under the Hard Disk Boot Priority setting you can choose whether to enable the HDD Change Message. This is a really annoying message that will halt boot up until you acknowledge it's announcement. You can also set up the Bootable Add-in Device to be either a PCI slot device or the onboard Serial ATA RAID array. One of the cooler features of this BIOS screen is that you can define what type of bootable USB device you are using. Your choices are a HDD, a floppy or autoselect.
| | 
(Advanced BIOS 1) | |
(Advanced BIOS 2) | | 
(Advanced BIOS 3) |
The Advanced Chipset Features screen gives you limited control of the DRAM settings, the AGP/P2P Bridge options and CPU/PCI bus options. You get four choices for the DRAM clock and DRAM Timing select. For DRAM Clock settings you can choose "By SPD"/133/166/200MHz. For DRAM Timing Select, your choices are Manual/BySPD/Turbo/Ultra. Selecting the Manual option gives you full control over the CAS, Trp, Tras and Trcd.
| | 
(Advanced Chipset Features) | |
(DRAM Settings 1) | 
(DRAM Settings 2) | 
(DRAM Settings 3) |
The Integrated Peripherals screen lets you control the IDE, PCI and Floppy controllers, the I/O ports and whether the video initializes an AGP or PCI slot first.
(Integrated Peripherals)
The last three screens to look at are pretty standard. There is the Power Management screen for control of the how the motherboard wakes up, shuts down and recovers from power loss. There is the PnP/PCI Config screen where you can set how the IRQ resources are allocated. and there is the PC Health screen which shows you what the Winbond Hardware Monitor chip is seeing from the many fan speed, temp and voltage probes built into the motherboard.
(Power Management) | 
(PnP/PCI Config) | 
(PC Health) |
Now that we've taken care of the hardware and the BIOS, let's load some software and kick this pig...
On to some benchmarks!
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