Installation

Installation was very easy. No problems here. All the connectors for power, SATA, floppy and IDE seem to be in the right places.  I like Abit's silent OTES heat-pipe chipset cooling solution ... it looks good and provides sufficient cooling for the chipset and mofets.

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After installing our large heatsink and fan, we noticed that there was plenty room left around the processor and DDR2 DIMM slots ... this would help ventilation. The rear ATX panel includes the usual connections for PS/2 mouse and keyboard.

There's are also SPDIF optical outputs, 2 eSATA ports, a total of 6 USB ports, dual gigabit ethernet ports and an array of HD audio connectors, however there's no firewire port. 

Test Setup

Procedures

In our tests we used the motherboard's standard BIOS settings first. Most settings were set to default (AUTO) for maximum compatibility. Memory clock was set to DDR2-1066 with the memory timings was set by SPD. We also used the latest video, audio and chipset drivers. Dual channel memory mode was enabled using the OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 SLI-Ready 2Gb Kit.

Here's a list of software/games we used for benchmarking. In all the gaming benchmarks we used a resolution of 1024x768 with maximum settings turned on (x4 AA and x16 AF )

 - CPUZ 
 - Science Mark 2
 - PC Mark 05
 - 3D Mark 2005
 - 3D Mark 2006
 - Prey v1.3
 - X3: Reunion
 - F.E.A.R.
 - Far Cry
 - Serious Sam

Windows XP with service pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c was used as our operating system.

For overclocking, we manually adjusted various BIOS settings including ram timings, FSB, CPU and DDR voltages. (Please see article index: Overclocking)

The BIOS

The BIOS was easy to use. Here, you can adjust various options including CPU frequencies, FSB, and of course voltages for memory, chipset and processor itself. Memory timings can also be adjusted.

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The BIOS uses Abit's uGuru overclocking feature ... you can set everything to AUTO or default for easy installation and setup. But we prefer to configure the BIOS manually.