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Left to right, top to bottom as usual. The top left corner of the board is dominated as usual by the power regulation circuitry for the CPU with a row of capacitors flanking the edge of the socket enclosure (not seen in that ABIT supplied photo) and the board will take a Swiftech MCX478 or Alpha PAL8942 without any issue as well as the usual raft of replacement coolers that use the standard Intel CPU retention mechanism.
Carrying on to the right we come across a fan header for powering a CPU or PSU fan and the 3 DIMM slots that we talked about on the previous page that support up to 2GB of unregistered, non ECC DDR SDRAM. The BIOS supports the 1.33x (3:4 fsb/dimm) memory multipler for DDR354 support at 133MHz CPU front side bus. With the CPU being able to take advantage of 4.2GB/sec of bandwidth from the GMCH (Northbridge) and DDR354 giving you around 2.7GB/sec after accounting for chipset memory controller efficiency (on i845 at least), there's a deficit in performance that even RIMM4200 in 4x RDRAM mode has trouble satiating. We'll have to wait for dual channel DDR solutions before we can truly feed the Pentium 4 with all the bandwidth it can eat.
The regular ATX power connector flanks the DDR DIMM slots on the right and with its vertical orientation and placement should suit the majority of users with tower cases and it certainly suits this reviewer.
From there on down the ABIT BG7 is standard P4 fare. The GMCH is passively cooled with a multi fin heatsink and the standard Z-clip. To the left of the GMCH you'll find the auxilliary ATX connector for an extra 12V supply to the board. From AGP port down we come across the 5 PCI slots, the southbridge (no active or passive cooling for the ICH4 on this board) and the IDE ports.
The ATX case headers are easily located and are labelled nicely so you might not need to refer to the users manual to wire up your case to the board. The floppy connector is the only spoiler on this board with it being so low down and rotated non vertically which for this reviewer at least is a non optimal placement.
Overall it's just a standard layout but worth some commentary.
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