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LOSTCIRCUITS		SHORTCUTS: Top Page, VRM musings At One Glance Bundle, Layout Connectors, BIOS Test Configuration Memory Performananc I/O Performance Winstones Gaming Performance Overclocking Conclusions Your comments? ABit Mainboards Online
ABit BH7    The Legend Lives On
(Review by MS, March 31, 2003)

Conclusion

It is fast and it clocks well and it has a unique color. It has no frills and one of the most solid VRMs we have seen in a long time plus a few additional nifty features like the angled IDE connectors. The absence of IEEE 1394 Firewire is tolerable, the somewhat lackluster implementation of SATA is not. It does explain, however, why, aside from cost issues, there is no serillel adapter included either. The verdict here is quite simple, the Marvell bridge implementation in its current form is not worth the silicon it is made from. This has nothing to do with the Marvell chip per se but with putting two bottlencks serillelly behind each other where each component exacerbates the other one's shortcomings. Add the fact that enabling the bridge effectively kills the secondary IDE channel and it is not hard to justify our verdict.

Still, overall it is very impressive what ABit has brewed up with the BH7 and there is certainly going to be a market for this board, regardless of Canterwood, Turbowood and Springdale which we will see soon enough. Sure enough, there will be the extremists who are going to need the latest and greatest but there is also the price factor and we won't see any of the high-end boards at a price point below $100 which is where the BH7 is positioned.

One thing we did not cover in this review is the onboard sound, the reason is plain and simple that I am not set up currently for any decent audio testing and before I go into unfounded statements and / or wild speculations, I rather skip that part.

Overall, it is hard not to recommend the BH7, it is a board for the tweaker, no doubt. The BH7 somehow is the equivalent of a classic British roadster, no frills, Abit unreasonable but lots of fun to play with. Anybody who wants all the gizmos will have to look elsewhere but then, he or she might find neither the performance nor the stability. But maybe an AMR ... or a CMedia Sound chip...

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