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Quality and Setup of the Abit BH7 |
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Lean, mean, orange machine |
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The first thing that
strikes you about the BH7 is the color of the PCB.
This would
have to be the first bright orange board we have seen.
The layout of the board is well thought out with ample
space between the various components and connections.
The "busiest" section of the board may well be the
power array. The capacitors that line the CPU
socket are all made by Rubycon, which are some of the
most reliable out there. This should
prevent problems that have plagued some other
boards in the past. We actually ran into
this problem with an Abit BE6-II ourselves recently. In
fact, all of the capacitors on the board are Rubycon,
and coupled with the 4-phase power that Abit uses on
the BH7 should increase stability, even when
overclocking. Abit also claims that this 4-phase
power circuitry will allow the BH7 to work with
forthcoming 800MHz FSB Pentium 4's as well, perhaps
prolonging the lifespan of the board in the process.
The device connections
consist of two ATA100 ports, a floppy drive port, and a Serial ATA connection. The most noticeable
feature about these connections would be the way the
IDE ports are positioned, mounted on their sides and
placed on the edge of
the board. Rarely used, this mounting of the IDE
ports helps prevent restriction of airflow around the
case with some neat folding of the IDE cables.
The Serial ATA connector is controlled by the Marvell
88i8030 bridge, which replaces the one by Silicon
Image listed on Abit's website. This bridge is
akin to using Abit's SERILLEL adapter in the second
IDE port, and in effect cancels it out. That is,
if a hard drive is connected to the Serial ATA
connector, the 2nd IDE ports is rendered inoperable.
While we applaud Abit in tinkering with new
technology, we find the application of the SERILLEL
bridge to be a shortcoming of the board. For
this review, at least, we did not suffer from this
since we had no SATA drives for testing.
In
what seems to be a rarity these days, the DIMM slots
are finally placed far enough away from the AGP slot
that no problems arise when swapping out memory
sticks when a video card is inserted into the slot.
We feel this is partially due to the relative lack of
features on the board, but is a nice move all
the same. The location of the 20 pin ATX
connection is also satisfactory, placed along the edge
by the floppy port, and away from the other
components. The on-board components all come by way of
RealTek. These consisted of 6-channel
audio supplied by the popular ALC650 chip, 10/100M
Ethernet connections by the RTL8101L chip, and the
RealTek RTM360-11R clock generator, which Abit often
uses for overclocking purposes. The reason being
this chip supports up to 250MHz FSB while allowing
fixed frequencies for the AGP and PCI buses.
The external connections
included the standard PS/2, parallel, and serial
ports. For full support of the 6-channel audio,
Abit included the three usual audio jacks for line-in,
line-out, and mic-in, but also had an additional two
jacks for the center/subwoofer channel and the
surround speakers. In addition, there were also
two S/PDIF jacks, one each for input to or output from
digital devices. For external connections to
other devices, there are four USB 2.0 ports and a
RJ-45 LAN jack standard. If the four USB ports
are not enough, we should mention that there is
another USB 2.0 header on the board for connecting
another 2 USB ports.
THE BIOS AND SETUP:
As
with all
current Abit boards, the Phoenix/Award BIOS
incorporates Abit's SOFTMENU technology. In this
section we found all of the settings necessary for
controlling the front side bus, CPU, and AGP/PCI bus
speeds. The FSB
can be raised in 1MHz steps from 100MHz all the way up to
250MHz. With this wide range of speeds, Abit has
expanded on the usual voltage options. Normally
with Abit boards,
we have seen options for raising the VCore in presets
of 5%,10%, and 15% over the default 1.5V. The BH7
has double the number of options, allowing for 20%, 25%,
and even 30%, bringing the VCore up close to 2V.
While we briefly went up as high as 30% during testing, it is not
recommended for prolonged use. The AGP and PCI
bus speeds can be locked in at 66/33 MHz, which
prevents devices using these buses from running too
far out of spec, and hindering overclocking of the
system. We also found options for raising the
DIMM voltages in .1V steps up from 2.55V to 3.05V, but
the AGP voltage only had two options, 1.5V or 1.6V.
The memory speed is also determined in the SoftMenu,
by selecting 1:1, 3:4, or 4:5 dividers depending on
the CPU/RAM speed ration desired.
Further tweaking of the
memory could be found in the Advanced Chipset
Features. There we could leave the memory set
"By SPD", or manually configure the CAS Latency, Tras,
Trp, and Trcd, but further optimizations such as the
Command Rate were not present. The PC Health
Status was helpful in that it can either alert the
user to a potentially harmful situation, or shut down
the system entirely. This actually came into
play while we were overclocking the BH7. While
trying to achieve a stable overclock at a FSB of 165MHz, we had
the VCore set at 25% while using the stock Intel
cooler. An alert rang out soon after
benchmarking the system, alerting us that the
temperature threshold had been met.
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Overclocking
the Abit BH7 |
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A
little tweak here, a little voltage there, and
Voila! |
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Overclocking the BH7 was as easy
as entering in a value for the front side bus in the
SoftMenu and saving our settings. We locked the
AGP and PCI bus speeds to prevent any problems from arising
there. We were able to go directly up to 152MHz before
we hit our first snag. Starting up Windows XP
immediately caused Fatal System Errors. At this point,
we raised the CPU voltage to 10% over the default and
continued on up to 160MHz. After a few more errors or
failed starts, we lowered the memory timings from their
optimized numbers to 'By SPD'. This allowed us to
continue, but we were alerted at 165MHz that the CPU was
running a bit too hot. Definitely an issue where a
better cooling solution was needed. We swapped out the
stock Intel cooler and installed a Zalman fan cooler that
can be seen in one of the board shots above. Even
though this lowered the CPU temperature by a good 10
degrees, we found that benchmarking the system was near
impossible. We did not completely crash Windows, but we could not complete
the longer, more involved tests. We went as high as
the full 30% that the BIOS allowed for raising the CPU
voltage, but to no avail. We backed off a few MHz on
the FSB to obtain a completely stable overclock at 163MHz,
and then lowered the voltage to run the CPU a bit cooler.
For some quick calculations, by raising the FSB to 163MHz,
we were effectively using the CPU at 3.09GHz, while the
memory was running at 202MHz.
System Comparisons and
Sandra Scores
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