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ABit BH7    The Legend Lives On
(Review by MS, March 31, 2003)

Overclocking

From all that is said and written about the BH7 and, moreover, from looking at the technical details, it appears to have what it takes to be an excellent overclocker. We tried first with the standard 2.8GHz P4 which went up to 3.15 GHz like it does in about every other board we have tried and that was it. 145 MHz FSB and not one iota further. The situation changed when we stuck in an unlocked 2.0 GHz P4 and even though we did not get all the way up to an 800 MHz bus, the results are quite appealing:

With the memory speed set to a 1:1 ratio, the highest we could run at was 193MHz. With the HWStrap set to low and the CPU: memory ratio to 3:4 the system would not POST which is not too surprising since we would be looking at 260 MHz memory speed (DDR520 ~ PC4160 DDR - we limited ourselves to 2.75V on the VDDR). Changing HWStrap to high and allowing the 4:5 to run the memory at 240 MHz went well enough to run Comanche4 and a few other applications but it was not possible to even get into Windows if we increased the FSB by a single MHz only to 194 MHz FSB. Bottom line is that it's not the memory that was holding us back but either the chipset or the CPU and unfortunately, there is no way of telling.

In view of some of the latest reports on the web showing 200 MHz and higher FSB this looks somewhat disappointing at first but most of these results were achieved using a Prometeia cooler whereas we were running everything using standard air cooling at room temperature.

Some Memory Benchmarks for Dessert

Those are pretty impressive scores (memory bus at 240 MHz)

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