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Quality and Setup of the Abit BE7 RAID |
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Plain Jane |
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The
Abit BE7 RAID motherboard wasn't quite as glitzy as
the other two boards in this shoot-out. In fact,
it is on of the few boards in recent memory
that did not come based on some kind of colored PCB.
The BE7 came on a standard brown
PCB without any coloring of the ports or other
components, except the IDE ports, green for the
standard ones, and yellow for the RAID. The RAID ports were controlled by a HighPoint HPT372
controller, which was covered with the green BE7 RAID
sticker seen in the first picture. These two
ports and the floppy port nearby were placed
perpendicular to airflow from front mounted case fans.
If a RAID configuration is not desired, these two
ports can be used as standard ATA133 IDE ports, thus
doubling the number of drives that can be connected.
It appears that all
on-board components are powered by Realtek chips.
10/100 Ethernet capabilities are provided by the
Realtek RTL8100B chip placed near the AGP slot, and
the smaller chip to the right is the Realtek RTM360
clock generator. Rounding out the three, 6
channel audio is supplied using the Realtek ALC650
chipset. The ALC650
supports S/PDIF and 5.1 speaker output using
connections already on the board. No extra
brackets or breakout boxes are required. For gaming
and performance audio, however, a PCI based device is
a necessity here. The Northbridge was cooled
with a passive heatsink. While
the heatsink was decent sized, and was attached to the
Northbridge using a thermal pad, the missing fan
reaffirmed the feeling that this motherboard was
"no-frills".
We didn't have many
specific issues with the layout of the components, and
most of our usual gripes were in fact non-existent
with this board. For one, the DIMM slots were
placed far enough away from the AGP slot that they two
did not interfere with each other when swapping
hardware. The 20-pin ATX connector was placed
high in the corner past the DIMM slots, away from all
other parts. This prevents the cables from
getting tangled up and reducing airflow from around
the CPU. Large Capacitors were placed in a tight
group, along with a row of MOSFETS, behind the external
I/O connections. Our only gripe was that the
capacitors almost completely encapsulated the other
12v ATX power connection. Care must be taken when
connecting or unplugging the 12v ATX connector.
The external connections
included the standard PS/2, parallel, and serial
ports. What distinguished this motherboard was
the full set of audio outputs. There were 3
jacks for Mic-in, line-in, and line-out, but
additionally we found jacks for a
center/subwoofer speaker as well as rear speakers.
There was also an optical plug for S/PDIF output.
Unfortunately, adding one set of ports usually results
in the sacrifice of another. Only two USB 2.0
ports came standard, although a bracket provided in
the box allowed for and additional two. To
complete the setup a RJ-45 LAN port is present for
networking purposes.
THE BUNDLE:
The bundle contents were
somewhat spartan as well, with the contents being the
motherboard with user's manual and driver disks, two
ATA 80-pin cables, one floppy cable, a bracket with 2
external USB 2.0 ports, and the I/O shield.
While this was just enough to get a machine up and
running, there weren't any "WOW" factors to impress us.
In a crowded marketplace of I845PE boards there needs
to be something to whet the appetite, but we just
didn't find it here. Hopefully the board will
make up some ground in the benchmarks.
THE BIOS AND OVERCLOCKING:
Abit has incorporated the
long heralded SoftMenu III into
the otherwise standard AWARD BIOS. In the
Advanced BIOS features we found the usual items for
determining the boot order, important when using RAID
drives in conjunction with other hard drives and
CD-ROMs. 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. We were
also able to enable or disable the caching of the
video and system BIOSes, and could manually alter the AGP mode
and aperture size.
Again, in the Integrated
peripherals, we could enable or disable any
integrated components. 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 reach the specified
temperature, either an alarm will sound, and the system
can be automatically turned off. Finally, in the
aforementioned SoftMenu III, we found the various
speed and voltage settings for overclocking the
system. By setting the CPU Operating Speed to
Manual, we were able to manually enter the CPU speed,
with the AGP and PCI speeds following suit.
These can be locked in at a certain speeds, however, by
simply setting the PCI bus frequency to a fixed
33MHz. There weren't any settings to
raise the voltage of the AGP slot, but the DRAM
voltage could be raised in .1V steps from 2.5 to 2.7.
The CPU Vcore was a tad different from other boards,
with no direct settings available to us. Instead
of defined voltages, the VCore settings were Standard,
+5%, +10%, and finally +15% (1.725V max)..
When overclocking the Abit BE7,
we figured we would jump right in and bring up the FSB
to 150MHz, since we knew with the first board that we
should be able to get into the 160-170MHz range.
This caused a BIOS Checksum error on the next reboot,
however, and we had to clear the BIOS and start over again.
On our next attempt, we slowly raised the FSB, and
found that we needed to lower the DRAM timings to get
a stable boot. Unlike the MSI board, which
locked in the speed of the RAM at DDR333, here the
speed increased with the FSB. The Corsair XMS
memory we used was rated at CAS 2.5 at higher speeds,
which is why we needed to lower the timings. We
finally settled in at a 166MHz FSB again (2.82GHz), and performed
another round of benchmarks.
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