Abit BG7-E ver Bios 1.07

The board is shipped in the standard Abit box. Inside the box you

can find the mobo, the

userÃ&402;¢ââ&8364;&353;‰â&8364;&382;¢s

guide, one CD with drivers and utils, one USB bracket, one floppy

cable, one IDE cable and the ATX shield. As you can see the package

is rather modest considering other Abit packages, but

thatÃ&402;¢ââ&8364;&353;‰â&8364;&382;¢s

normal considering the board's target. From the

userÃ&402;¢ââ&8364;&353;‰â&8364;&382;¢s

guide quality perspective there are not many differences between

the Abit boards.

The BG7E users manual is good; it describes the motherboard's

installation in several languages and the BIOS settings and drivers

installation in English only. The board has five PCI slots, one AGP

and three DDR slots. On board there can be found a six channels

sound solution, a Fast Ethernet port and the integrated video port.

The board

doesnÃ&402;¢ââ&8364;&353;‰â&8364;&382;¢t

come with Serial ATA, RAID, Firewire or other more or less exotic

gadgets, but it delivers a basic feature set for regular home

users.

The board's layout is traditional. BG7E has two power headers. The

main one is located near the memory slots, in a very good location

and the 12V one is positioned near the GMCH. We can find three fan

headers on board, two of them are very close to the CPU socket and

the third one is located near the IDE connectors. The board is able

to accommodate six USB ports, four ports being available on

headers.

Quite interesting the board

doesnÃ&402;¢ââ&8364;&353;‰â&8364;&382;¢t

suffer from DIMM insertion problems. Abit uses Realtek chips in

order to provide the audio and LAN functions, no matter if we

discuss about low end or high end motherboards. Regular PC Hardware

readers know that I have "the odd behavior" to underline the bad

things in the boards' design. In this case I was not able to find

the weak points in Abit BG7E's design. Due to the fact that Abit

didnÃ&402;¢ââ&8364;&353;‰â&8364;&382;¢t

include too many additional onboard devices, the board looks very

much like the old, tough, designed for overclocking boards. I would

have liked even more BG7E's design if the IDE connectors had been

placed in the front of the DIMM slots.

On the 845 chip you can find a large heatsink and no fan. The chip

doesnÃ&402;¢ââ&8364;&353;‰â&8364;&382;¢t

get too hot so that the Abit cooling solution is good. The passive

cooling is recommended when possible because it increases

reliability (no moving parts are involved).