Abit BH7 (Intel 845PE) Motherboard Review
Overclocking and stability
During the tests, there was nothing to complain about stability of the board.
The power converter is based on the 4-channel scheme and has eight 3300 mkF plus three 1200 mkF capacitors.
Now on to the overclocking options. To test the overclocking potentials, I used a Pentium4 2.4B processor, which as our stress test showed, provided a guaranteed running at FSB speeds up to 180 MHz inclusive.
All the overclocking options are traditional for Abit motherboard and are gathered in the "SoftMenu III" section.
Look at the FSB variation range, which is as wide as 100 - 250 MHz (in 1 MHz increments).
The second important item is varying the processor voltage. To attain stability, the overclocker can raise the Vcore by 30% of the nominal value. This is about too much: with the nominal Vcore = 1.5V the maximum boost equals 0.45V (i.e. the maximum Vcore = 1.95V), and the variation is performed in 0.075V (5%) increments.
So overclockers have every reason to be pleased by the wide processor voltage variation range, but the increment at which the variation is done is too big (0.025V would have been much better).
Next item is in charge of raising the memory voltage (Vmem). Its variation range is between nominal 2.55V and 3.05V (in 0.05V increments).
The range is superb - we've got a really fantastic tool for overclocking the memory.
And finally it's possible raising the AGP voltage. The admissible values are: 1.5V (nominal voltage) and 1.6V.
At increased speeds it is important that the PCI and AGP bus speeds not depart from the standard 33 and 66 MHz, respectively, if possible. This is primarily important for the correct hard disk functioning. The possibility to set a fixed PCI bus speed is there on most i845PE motherboards. But on the Abit BH7 motherboard this function is missing - the PCI speed is set in direct dependence on the FSB speed. The following divisors (PCI/FSB) are accessible: 1/3, 1/4, 1/5 and 1/6.
The maximum stable bus speed of our board in question amounted to 180 MHz with the air-cooling system used, and 185 MHz with water cooling.
The general conclusion is this - the Abit BH7 has a most powerful among i845PEGE motherboards selection of options for overclocking the processor and memory.
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