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Review: ABIT BG7

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 4 August 2002, 00:00

Tags: abit

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BIOS, Bundle and Manual




The BIOS is usual ABIT fare, tailored to the BG7. Softmenu III takes care of CPU performance adjustment, memory clock, PCI/AGP bus clock and also the voltage adjustment for CPU and memory.

On the review board you have generous adjustment on the memory voltage just like the IT7 with up to 3.2V Vdimm voltage available and up to 1.7V on the processor using a Northwood, 0.2V+ over stock Vcore and all the way down to 1.1V.

Being an Intel i845G board, you have two choices for the setting for memory adjustment on the GMCH. Related to the front side bus (which is set independently), high and low on this 'HW Strap' setting relate to 533MHz and 400MHz front side bus frequencies and let you adjust the fsb:mem ratio. With Low selected you can choose 1:1 to lock memory frequency to the front side bus frequency or you have 3:4 (fsb:mem) ratio for "1.33 x front side bus frequency" which is how you enable DDR354 support at 133MHz (533Mhz) front side bus.

With High selected you again have 1:1 and also 4:3 for "front side bus frequency / 1.33" which is how you enable DDR200 support at 133MHz (533Mhz) front side bus.

So no official DDR333 support for which you'd need 4:5 ratio but you do have some sort of memory multiplier available.

Being an AWARD BIOS you don't get the excellent SCSI support of AMI BIOS' with only a single SCSI boot selector but otherwise the BIOS is usual ABIT fare. You have control over the S1 or S3 ACPI support which functions well given compatible devices and it's nice to see the onboard LAN controller and driver seemingly supporting both modes.

Bundle wise ABIT didn't go over the top with a pair of extra USB2.0 compatible ports, the manual, driver CD, CPU heatsink retention cage (which wasn't fitted out of the box) and since it was World Cup time when the board was sent out to us, a blow up ABIT football which was promptly blown up and kicked around the house.

The manual is everything you've come to expect from an ABIT manual. It covers all bases, is decently translated and all the information that you are likely to need is easily found. It would be nice if more companies took the lead of DFI and Asus and provided a simple card or sheet with the ATX case pin layouts for quick reference but it's no great loss since the manual is nice and the pins themselves are labelled clearly.