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When it came to overclocking the Abit IN9 32X-MAX, it was one of the most forgiving boards you can find. Typically, a successful overclock will have the board boot into the OS, but with yet to be seen stability issues. But with this Abit beast, if I pushed the FSB to a frequency that the chipset didn't like, it simply wouldn't post, just a black screen and the sound the the optical drive clicking. Once back in the BIOS, I could see that it had loaded the last known good configuration for me. That is quite the blessing; having the last functional attempt loaded up so I don't have to re-insert all of my previous timings and settings.

Another plus of the Abit IN9 32X-MAX motherboard being that I didn't have to dumb down the memory timings for our Corsair TWIN2X1024 PC-8500 DDR2 memory. I was still able to run at the 4-4-4-12(2T) timings I had done all of my stock testing with. As for the memory speeds, I cranked it up to a stable and solid 1060MHZ. So keeping that in mind, we should see some nice memory figures during the overclocking tests.

On an added overclocking note, I chose to forgo any overclocking tests running with 5-5-5-15/2T 1066MHZ speeds. For one, I had incredible difficulty attaining and maintaining a stable OC at those lower SPD timings. The system would boot  when set to 5-5-5-12/2T 1400MHZ, but would crash when running benchmarks like Doom 3 and WinRAR. There's got to be at sweet spot in there somewhere, probably around that 1300MHZ range. But running and testing at this lower speed would show such minor difference (when compared to 4-4-4-12/2T), that it wouldn't really be worth the added effort. The reasons for this apparent stability issue; high-end memory modules want those tight timings, the MCH (Memory Controller Hub) communications portion of the chip set can't handle the lower settings, and or the BIOS really needs an update.    

As for the CPU and FSB settings used, I was only able to play around CPU multipliers of 6,7, and 8. A little disappointing that no one has managed to unlock the E6400's upwards as I would have liked to have seen 10x in there somewhere. The FSB, however, does stretch from 400MHz up to 3000MHZ. At stock settings, the FSB runs at 1066.7 MHz, while my overclock reached 1795MHz across all three multipliers. A little odd, since I would have expected to reach a higher FSB with that 6x multiplier, and should have had to dim down the FSB when running at 8x. This can mean only one thing . . .

This board is begging for a BIOS revision!

Unfortunately, Abit hasn't released any new BIOS updates, sticking us with version 1 for the time being. So making due, I be running my overclock tests using the 6,7, and 8 multipliers at that same 1795MHz FSB. Here's a list of all the voltages used for overclocking the Abit IN9 32X-MAX motherboard.