The Abit BG7E Motherboard Review
An Abit Board For the Masses...

By Robert Maloney
February 24, 2003

Hot Hardware Test System AthlonXP All the Way!!

TESTING METHODOLOGY:

To help fully explain the scores we listed in the following benchmarks, we felt it was necessary to explain how the systems were setup before running the benchmarks. On all of the boards, we started off by manually optimizing the BIOS settings to the most aggressive system options available. The memory frequency was manually set to DDR333 with the CAS timings set to 2-5-5-2 and a 1T command rate.  The hard drive was formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 was installed. After the Windows installation was complete, we installed the Intel Chipset update drivers and Application Accelerator, and then installed the drivers for the rest of the components.  Auto-Updating, Hibernation, and System Restore were disabled, and then we set up a 512MB permanent page file. On these test systems we set the visual quality to "best performance" in Windows XP's "system performance" section, as well as in the video driver settings.  With NVIDIA's  41.03 drivers, there are options to set the performance level between "application" and "aggressive".  For this choice, we chose the aggressive setting, which sacrifices a bit of image quality to gain performance.  Lastly, we installed all of the benchmarking software, defragged the drive, and rebooted one last time.

Overclocking the Abit BG7E Get On The Bus!

When we got to overclocking the BG7E, we went into the well-known SoftMenu III section within the BIOS. First, we set the CPU Operating Speed to User define, then locked in the PCI bus at 33MHz. In this manner we were hoping to avoid any devices from failing when running too far out of spec. We were able to directly type in a number for the Front Side Bus, and we left all other settings such as DRAM ratio at the default "By SPD" settings. We started to increase the FSB by 5MHz jumps until we hit 150MHz. At this point, any attempt to start Windows failed miserably with blue screen STOP errors ranging from problems with ACPI.SYS to CONFIG.INITIALIZATION FAILED. We expected to get higher, based on our past experiences with the 845PE boards where we got the FSB as high the mid 160MHz range.  We tried raising the CPU Vcore 5% at a time, maxing out at 15% above the standard 1.5V, and disabled the 'Enhance DRAM performance' settings, but to no avail. Finally, we lowered all of the memory timings on the Corsair PC3500 DDR RAM from 2-5-2-2 to 2-7-3-3. Doing so, we were finally able to continue on until we hit 167MHz. Windows XP loaded, but every attempt at running almost any of the benchmarks failed. Just kicking the system back 1MHz gave us a stable overclocked system at 166MHz, a 25% increase in the bus speed, with the CPU showing up as 2.82GHz. Coincidentally (or not), this was the same speed that we had managed to obtain with the BE7 in the last review.

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