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| ABit BH7 The Legend Lives On | ||
| (Review by MS, March 31, 2003) |
On-Board Connectors and Jumpers
The only jumper on board is the ClearCMOS, everything else can be configured in the SoftBIOS. Four fan headers are supplying ample possibilities for auxiliary and system fans without the need to go through the poser supply directly. The BH7 features one CD and one Aux input for the onboard audio, one additional USB 2.0 header, one infrared and a SMBus interface The ATX power connector is in the top half at the right edge of the PCB, similar to what we have known from ASUS boards in the past. The auxiliary dual 12V input is right where it is most necessary, that is directly in the global area of the VRM. Granted that there is a small chance that the cables will cause air turbulences but in general we just refer to our old 2 ¢ advice to use a cable tie and strap the wires out of the way.
With respect to power, ABit has added two status LEDs, a green one to indicate standby power and a red one to signal that the system is actually running. The latter is somewhat redundant but better safe than sorry.
The I/O panel features the serial and parallel legacy ports, the PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors and the four USB 2.0 ports, topped by the RJ45 Ethernet port. Optical audio in and out as well as the standard 5.1 connectors are among the dominant features in the I/O panel.
BIOS
ABit uses the standard Award v6.00PG BIOS with the ABit-typical modifications, specifically the SoftMenu III is one of the features that set ABit apart from everybody else. In the case of the i845PE chipset, there is not much that can be changed over the ordinary options, though, meaning that the choice of components like the earlier mentioned RTM360-110R clock generator will define what options are available.
Therefore, options are restricted to basically what everybody else offers who is using the same hardware. CPU overclocking options are available as selecting the FSB in 1 MHz steps from 100 to 250 MHz. Like most other boards, the BH7 offers multiplier adjustments, in this case, the range goes from 8x to 32x which, of course has to viewed in the context that none of the current P4 versions are unlocked. This may change in the past if Intel resorts to defining a clock rate range for their processors rather than locking the multipliers, so far, there are only rumors about it. Worth mentioning but that's about it.
The next option is the so-called DRAM Ratio H/W strap which refers to a hard-locked specification of running the SDRAM in asynchronous mode. The options are high, low or by CPU meaning that either a 100/400 MHz FSB or a 133/533 MHz FSB CPU can be hard selected, which then sets the CPU : DRAM ratio to 3:4 or 4:5, respectively. The "By CPU option uses the CPUID of the processor to determine the appropriate ratio if the asynchronous mode is selected in the next entry.
Last not least, the SoftMenuIII features the voltage adjustments for Vre, VDD (DDR) and AGP. Since different Intel processors have different default voltages, the settings are defined in % over normal, ranging from default over +5% all the way up to +30%. The DRAM voltage selection goes from 2.55 all the way up to 3.05 with the latter being almost guaranteed to fry the DIMMs in the long run. The AGP voltage is adjustable to either 1.5 or 1.6V.
The same voltages are also monitored in the PC Health status page and here, the numbers are slightly below specification or user settings at all times. Since we have seen this before, we quickly measured the real voltages at both VDD/VDDQ pins of the DDR DIMM slots and at one of the upper FETs of the VRM Briefly, when the DDR voltage was selected as 2.65V, the HW monitor showed fluctuations between 2.62 and 2.64, we measured 2.69 stable directly at the slot. A very similar situation holds for the core voltage, default or 1.5V for the 2.8GHz P4 showed as 1.45-1.47V in the BIOS, the volt meter showed a rock-solid 1.509V at the CPU.
The Advanced Chipset Features menu follows the same settings that everybody else has which is CAS latency of 1.5, 2 and 2.5, tRCD and tRP options of 2 and 3 and a tRAS value from 5 to 7. Keep in mind that the i845 chipset variations do not support AGP8X , therefore, the only options are 2X and 4X. Also, Current DRAM chips do not offer the pipeline stages required for running CAS-1.5 which means that in most cases selection of this option will result in POST failure.
The Integrated Peripherals menu has the usual suspects in the form of IDE controllers, AC97 and LAN with the additional option of enabling / disabling the network BOOT ROM. One peculiarity is the enabling / disabling of the SATA bridge. The manual states that enabling the Marvell SATA bridge will reduce the number of devices that can be run on the secondary IDE channel to a single device. Unfortunately, in reality, what happens is that enabling the SATA bridge will completely eliminate the second IDE channel, no device will be recognized regardless of whether it is set as master, slave or cable select. Bottom line is that if all of a sudden the DVDROM on the secondary channel no longer works, it is worthwhile to check whether by chance the SATA bridge is enabled.
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