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Quality and Setup of the Abit BGE7 |
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This board won't give
you the blues |
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The board was a bit of a
"Plain Jane". No fancy coloring of the PCB, no custom
graphics or colors on the components, and the heatsink
cooling the Northbridge was a standard passive finned type.
The layout of the board was simple and clean, even on what
appeared to be smaller dimensions than usual (30 x 21.5cm).
This was made possible by the relatively few "extra"
features found on the board. As I mentioned in the
introduction, there were no RAID ports on the board, and no
Serial ATA connections either. As far as drive controllers
go, we were left with the two ATA100 ports and the floppy
port. These were placed on the board in close to ideal
locations, however. The IDE ports were on the edge of the
board, close to where the drives would be mounted in a
mid-tower case. The floppy port was a bit further down
towards the corner, placed perpendicular to airflow from a
front-mounted case fan. While I did not have any problems
using this board in my case, this positioning of the port
could cause problems in a larger tower.
The P4
socket had a metal latch, making it a bit sturdier than the
plastic ones used by some other manufacturers and was lined
on one side by a row of capacitors. These were perhaps
placed a bit too close to the bracket, making it trickier to
remove the heatsink / fan once it was mounted to the CPU.
As we mentioned earlier, the nearby Northbridge was
passively cooled by a large aluminum heatsink. This was held
down tightly using a two clip method. A thermal pad
was placed between the two which should provide for good
heat transfer. Although it was held down tightly, a little
pressure with your thumb on the black pad on one of the
clips allowed for easy removal for upgrading if necessary.
In the search for quieter systems, passive cooling probably
does the job well enough, and without extra fan headers it
would be hard to install a, additional heatsink / fan combo
anyway. We found three fan headers on the board, one by the
CPU, one in the middle for a rear-mounted case fan, and the
other in a far corner, possibly for a front-mounted case
fan. Any other cooling methods would require Molex
connections off of the Power Supply. Speaking of which, the
ATX power connectors were in good positions as well. The
20-pin ATX connection was mounted at the corner of the
board, above the DIMM slots. This prevented the thick
mass of cables from interfering with other components and /
or possibly restricting airflow around the CPU. The smaller
12V ATX connection was on the far side of the CPU, which
meant we had to snake the cables around or over the CPU's
heatsink. It wasn't hidden in with other components,
however, and we really didn't find any problems with this
placement.
Integrated
components are what this board is all about, and a complete
solution of video, audio, and LAN capabilities were found.
The on-board 6-channel audio was provided by the Realtek
ALC650 Chip found near the edge of the board. While the
quality of the sound might not be as impressive as a
secondary add-in card like an Audigy or Hercules soundcard,
but it still holds its own. The ALC650 also supports S/PDIF
out and 5.1 speaker output using connections already on the
board. No extra brackets or breakout boxes are
required. Placed right near the ALC650 chip were the
two black CD-IN connectors. The 10/100 Mbit LAN was provided
by another Realtek chip, this being the RTL8100. This
chip was placed more towards the middle next to the clock
generator, also made by Realtek.
The
external connections included the standard PS/2, parallel,
and serial ports. One serial port, however, was
sacrificed in order to provide the 15-pin VGA output for the
on-board Intel Extreme Graphics. Another major noticeable
feature was the full audio output support. There were
3 jacks for mic-in, line-in, and line-out, but additionally
we found additional jacks for a center / subwoofer speaker
as well as rear speakers. There was also an optical
plug for S/PDIF output. Only 2 USB 2.0 ports came
standard, although a bracket provided in the box allowed for
the use of two additional ports. To complete the setup
an RJ-45 LAN jack was used for networking purposes.
THE BIOS
AND SETUP:
Abit has
incorporated the well known and respected SoftMenu III into
the AWARD Phoenix v6.00PG BIOS. In SoftMenu III, we had
options to allow the CPU speed to be automatically detected,
or user can define their own settings and change the front
side bus to any speed between 100 and 250 MHz. It is
here where most, if not all, of the overclocking choices
were found, such as changing the PCI bus frequency using
dividers or locked speeds, and raising voltage levels for
the CPU and DRAM. The CPU Vcore was raised using
percentages (+5, +10, +15%) rather than defined voltages,
which is somewhat different than what we are normally
accustomed to seeing. The DRAM voltage is more
standard, and can be raised from 2.5v to 2.7v, if needed.
In the Advanced Chipset section of the BIOS we found basic
timings for the DRAM, offering options for the CAS Latency
Time, Precharge Delay, DRAM RAS to CAS delay and DRAM RAS
Precharge. There were also settings for caching the
video or system BIOS and setting the AGP mode. The PC
Health Status screen provided us with a few options to
protect the system from accidental overheating. We
found an alarm setting should the CPU fan fail, as well as
an option to shutdown the system entirely should such an
event occur. These settings can be used in conjunction
with the monitoring of the CPU temperature using the built-n
thermal diode in the CPU. Should the CPU's core reach
the specified temperature, either an alarm will sound, or
the system can be automatically turned off.
While most
of the setup was uneventful, we ran into a snag when trying
to boot the system for the first time. The POST operations
got as far as reading the CPU and RAM, but before we could
even enter the BIOS, we were left at a mostly blank screen
with a blue bar running across the bottom. We tried this a
few times, and even were able to get into the BIOS every now
and then with some frantic hitting of the Delete key. We
were able to update the appropriate settings, but it seemed
that whenever we got to the PC Health section, the BIOS
would lock up. We then set out to find the source of our
problems. We cleared the CMOS and tried re-flashing the
BIOS, we even took apart the system and ran just the board
and video card without being attached to the chassis, but
never got any further. Finally, one time while we were in
the PC Health section, we noticed that the Enermax case fan
we had attached to the middle fan header was causing the
system temperature to be listed at 125 degrees F (?) and
then the system locked again. We then removed the case
fan from the header, and that solved the problem. It
was quite odd to see a fan, simply drawing power from the
board through the pins, cause such instability. With our
revision of the board and BIOS there was an issue in how
system temperatures were being "read" by the BIOS, but later
BIOS revisions should take care of this problem.
Testing Configuration and Overclocking
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