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Are uGuru?

The uGuru Utility is fundamentally an advanced overclocking, hardware monitoring and statistics toolset. uGuru is heavily marketed and should be as it's really nice. Its primary function has its focus on overclocking and allows you to change a host of clock and voltage settings. Mainly it's a tweaking suite that correlates to your mainboard's hardware. On the mainboard we can find a little uGuru sticker (I'll show you later) and when you take it off you'll notice a little Winbond controller chip. It can manage your fans, store BIOS profiles and save your overclocking frequencies.

At BIOS level it'll also give you a bundle of new options like ABIT eQ/FanEQ that serves to control the rotation speeds of the fans. Fantastic stuff, especially once you enter the uGuru menu.

It controls the CPU fan as well as the fan on the North Bridge. This works like you want it to. If your CPU is hot the fan should be fully active, if it's cold that fan can rotate at much lower speeds. You can enter the bottom and top threshold values when the cooler works at its slowest or highest speed. Between these two critical temperatures, the rotational speed of the fan changes linearly, with a loud fan this can be quite an annoyance though. Next to that you can set alarms.

uGuru software also runs from a GUI e.g. Windows.

ABIT provided its uGuru suite with several other pieces of software: among them updating the BIOS from Windows that is very nice, sending messages to the technical service with Black Box software, setting up the audio codec, etc. You can configure FanEQ either in the BIOS (where you can also set up the maximum and minimum voltages sent to the cooler) or in a special Windows-based utility. ABIT EQ is an exclusive hardware monitoring utility. There are several other pieces of software with OCGuru software being most important for the average PC user. On the fly in windows you can change several settings like your processor/memory speeds. There's much to play around with and the true freaks will love it.

The Bundle

Abit's AA8XE bundle is a little on the trimmed side, but of course all of the essentials are provided. Included are the following:

• Motherboard manual
• Software manual
• Motherboard jumper settings sticker (for inside of chassis)
• SATA driver disk
• Driver/uGuru CD
• Quick Installation guide
• One 80-Conductor IDE cable
• One floppy cable
• Four grey SATA cables
• Back panel cover
• Additional USB/IEEE1394 port bracket

That's it. No additional software, game bundle, cable madness. But hey, it's all you need and thus more than sufficient.