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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)

ABit ships the BH7 with a rather Spartan bundle, that is one floppy, one 80-wire ribbon and one SATA cable which is the only hardware bundle aside from the obligatory I/O shield. There is no Serillel adapter included with the BH7, likewise, anybody looking for additional USB brackets or similar gizmos will be disappointed. Documentation is provided in the form of the usual rather elaborate manual available also in PDF format on the driver CD.

The bare minimum of hardware is bundled with the BH7, no USB bracket no Serillel adapter, just the survival kit.

The layout of the BH7 is clean, there is no excess fat in terms of extra features on the board at all. The three DIMM slots need to be viewed with the caveat that slots 2 and 3 are shared meaning that in case both slots are populated only single bank modules can be used. The AGP slot is directly above the five PCI slots and far enough away from the memory slots so that there should not be any overlap of the territory and memory modules can be swapped without removing the AGP card.

One special feature is the presence of the angled IDE connectors and even though this may be a bit late in the game for Parallel ATA it is still a highly applaudable solution in that it allows to get the ribbon cables completely out of the way. We have seen this feature before, starting with the FIC PA2013 and never understood why it was not generally accepted 5 years ago.

Quality and Onboard Components

We already mentioned the four-phase VRM and the sticking to a single brand of capacitors in the introduction, so there is no point in repeating ourselves here. Overall, the board looks very good, probably the best we have seen yet from ABit.

An interesting choice is the use of the RealTek RTL8101L integrated single-chip Fast Ethernet controller that also features an MC'97 interface and, in theory is capable of providing a combo-solution for LAN and software modem applications. The RTL8101L is equipped with a PCI and Boot ROM share interface for both EPROM and Flash memory.

On the clock-generator front, ABit is using another RealTek IC, the RTM360-110R which is also used by Iwill on the P4HT and which allows to specify a number of different PCI dividers (3-6 in this case) or else to run the FSB independent of the PCI bus, meaning that the latter can be locked at a fixed frequency, e.g. 33, 37 or 44 MHz. Onboard sound is provided through the integrated sound controller of the ICH4 and enabled through the ALC650 AC'97 audio CODEC.

             

Left: The RTM360-110R is used as clockgenerator. Center: The same bridge chip as the one used in the Serillel Adapter interfaces the SATA connector with the ICH4. Right: the angled IDE connectors help to keep ribbon cables out of the way.

Instead of using a real SATA controller, ABit resorts to using the Marvell bridge chip to interface the SATA connector to the IDE controller which is basically the same idea as sticking a Serillel adapter into the second IDE port. The result is similar, only the SATA device is supported and the secondary IDE connector is rendered completely dysfunctional. We will get back to this point later again.

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