OCZ Powerstream, Abit board makes for a groovy combo

WHEN DOING REVIEWS every so often you run into two products that work together really really well. In this case, it is the Abit AG8, or more specifically the AG8-3rd Eye, and the OCZ Powerstream power supply. If you want to play with overclocking, this is great setup as long as you are more toward the beginner end of the spectrum than the Fugger side.

Lets start with what each one is with the OCZ Powerstream up first. It is not your ordinary power supply, just as everything OCZ makes tends to be one step away from the ordinary.

Silly as it sounds, it looks really sharp, the case is a shiny titanium grey finish, and the fan grates are an anodised gold, but it is far from tacky. Everything just whispers subtlety, it is tasteful but still wows people. When you turn it on, it is lit with green LEDs for that floating glowy look, and has three more green LEDs with three blue screws above them. Those are the magic.

The whole point of this power supply is that it is easily adjustable. Each of the blue screws controls a rail, 3.3v, 5v or 12v, and you can adjust them up or down on the fly. If you go more than 5% high, the LED turns red, 5% low it turns yellow. If you only want to cook your drives, play with the 12v rail, if CPU death is your aim, go 3.3v. You can do what you want, but the feedback is a little coarse.

The Abit AG8 3rd Eye is another story entirely. It is the highest model of the lowest end board of their high end enthusiast line. I will wait while you read that again 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. OK, so the AG8 is a i915 based LGA775 board, with a 16x PCIe slot, 3 1x slots, 4 SATA ports, RAIDable, and all the rest of the 915/925 goodies. Without rehashing all the i915 features individually, lets just say this one doesn't miss anything important. One very nice touch is that it uses DDR rather than the more expensive DDR2, so it is sort of an upgrade path for S478 owners, if you consider keeping only your ram to be an upgrade. The AG8 is a good board to get your feet wet in either the LGA775 or PCIe worlds.

The thing that made me drool was something that surprisingly most people don't order, the 3rd Eye option, basically a bundled Guru Clock. If you have seen or used a new Abit board, you will see that they have a new series of technologies collectively called µGuru, or MicroGuru for the scientific nomenclature impaired. This tech allows you to control a bunch of features from overclocking to readouts of temperature, voltage and fan speeds all in software. The Guru Clock is an external readout of this in a little arch shaped LCD screen.

Now, the magic comes in when you put the clock, the board, and the power supply together and start doing the stupid things that I do all the time. When you are overclocking, and you want to test how much further you can get to on .05v more to the CPU, you reboot, go into the BIOS, change the setting, and try to get into Windows. Then you fire up the program that monitors the system and see how close it really is to where you want it to be. Then you shut down again, change the multiplier in the BIOS, and try to get into Windows. Rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat. Put a movie on, you will be at this for a while.

My particular setup for the fun of the past few days was the AG8-3rd Eye motherboard, an OCZ Powerstream 520 power supply, a P4/3.6GHz CPU, 1GB of Kingston HyperX DDR400 and an ATI X600 graphics card. Hard drives were varied as I played with different setups and installs, but in the end there was a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hooked up.

Rather than do the reboot more than a Win98 box routine, this setup allowed me to explore the limits of the board while only rebooting when I locked up the machine. Thankfully, no parts were smoked in the tweaking of the system. No animals were harmed either, but much Diet Coke was drunk, and sugary snacks were consumed in vast quantities.

So, the fun goes like this. Boot up the machine and wait until things get stable. Set the Guru Clock up so you can see it, and go into it's settings. It allows you to set a bunch of preset overclocking points, and if you set them so each step is a 2MHz bump in the FSB, you can go pretty far with very little effort.

So, you bump the FSB up, and watch the Clock. You can see the CPU temp rising, the fan spinning up, and you can watch for when it stabilizes. Once things calm down, you can bump it up another notch, simply by pressing a few buttons on the top of the Clock. Need more voltage on the fly? Screwdriver to the right rail on the Powerstream. If you want .1v, you look at the Clock and twist until it reads out right. Temp climbing high? Turn down the voltage until it levels off. The power of this setup is that you can see what is going on in real time rather than taking stabs in the dark between reboots.

Some of this is quite doable with the on board monitoring tools that are quite common today in high end boards, but few of those let you see what is going on while the system is under stress. If you fire up Half-Life 2 and run a demo loop or play the game, you can't really see what is going on with a monitoring program, and that is when you need the information the most. The Guru Clock lets you have instant readouts while you are fragging. It also lets you overclock with the buttons on the top while you are in the game.

You can tune many parameters of the system under load or no load, all in real time. It is a great way to screw around with low level overclocking for beginners, or to show people what effects various changes have on their machines. 'Look Timmy, when you turn the voltage WAY up, the temperature climbs, and the....oooh, smoke. Don't do that Timmy.'

I had a lot of fun with this board once I did one thing, update the BIOS. The newest Abit BIOS unlocked the potential of the board. Prior to the latest BIOS, v17, I could only crank the FSB to a meager 212MHz. The new BIOS, which supposedly breaks the Intel FSB locking scheme, worked wonders, and I blew through 212 with ease.

Now, you have to remember, the i915 is not a fire-breathing OC monster, it is a full featured tweakers board based around the lowest end chip in Intel's new line up. It has many the goodies of the more enthusiast oriented i925X or i925XE, but is in the end a more budget oriented chip. That said, with the setup I had, I got it to 222MHz FSB, or 3996MHz on the CPU before things started to blow up.

Before you point and laugh at the weak OC I got, the weak point of the system was the heatsink and fan combo. It was a vanilla Intel OEM fan, not recommended for anything more than stock speeds in a well ventilated case. The reason I can say this is that if I started upping the voltage much, or if I got the FSB to 220, you could watch the CPU temp climb up and up and up on the Guru Clock. When it hit 221/222, it didn't stop climbing until it decided life was no longer worth living. At 220, it leveled off before things got ugly.

During the course of experiments, most times the board recovered from blatant stupidity with ease, power it off, and it boots in a failsafe speed setting. Every once in a while, I overdid it, and it didn't like life much, usually failing in the boot process due to excessive heat. I know this because I could see what is going on. Every time, the µGuru section in the BIOS got me out with ease. For a rank amateur, it made things fun.

One other nice touch was the LED readouts on the board. When booting, it shows you what is going on, and what you did badly when setting things up. Hypothetically speaking, if you botch a simple thing like forgetting to put in the 4 pin power connector, it will tell you what you screwed up with only a trip to the manual. I would never do such a moronic thing though, so I must have read about it on a message board or something. More complicated problems also are easily diagnosed.

Coupled with the LEDs on the PSU, the Clock and the software overclocking, you have a powerful set of tools at your disposal. I would recommend the 3rd Eye variants of any of the new Abit mobos, in fact, I would say you are rather silly to get a mordern Abit board without one. If you already have a board without that option, you can pick one up and just plug it in. Last I heard it was only about $20, and if your board supports it, buy one now.

The Powerstream was a great power supply, and the tweaking options were a blast to play with once I got over the initial fear of cooking some expensive parts. If I didn't blow anything up, you are probably pretty safe. The Powerstream comes in 420w, 520w and 600w versions, but only the 600w appears to have the 6 pin connector for PCIe video cards. If you have a PCIe system, go for the 600, anything else, the others are a solid choice.

Overall, this combo was a lot of fun. An air cooled OC of more than 10% on a pretty highly stressed early CPU sample isn't bad, and if I had a good heat sink, I probably could have gone a lot farther. None of the products exhibited anything more than minor quirks, and everything did at least what it was supposed to, and usually had some other features or niceties I was not expecting.

I would give the board alone an 8/10, a really solid mobo for starting out as a tweaker or overclocker. The hardcore set will probably want to go for the Fatality boards, but that is way beyond what I am capable of doing. The Powerstream gets a 9/10, it is stylish and does everything it should well. The only thing it did not have that I wanted was the PCIe VGA connector, that would probably gave given it a perfect score.

As I said in the intro, the beauty of these products is not in either individually, good as they are, but in the sum of what they can do together. With some solid components backing them, they were able to provide instant feedback on what you were doing when you were doing it. You could do that in a game, out of a game, or even during boot, and locking up didn't pose as much of a problem either. On the few times I did it, I could tell why it froze, and that is a tremendous help. Together, I had a blast just doing stupid things, the kind of things your mother would probably tell you not to do. The combo of a OCZ Powerstream and any Abit board with a Guru Clock rates a 10/10 for me. I will probably be playing with this combo for a long time to come. µ