Introduction
The 845D chipset from Intel and it's subsequent iterations have played an integral part in taking the Pentium 4 from being the laughing stock that it once was to being without a doubt, the dominant platform currently available. Whilst the 850 was fast, it used unpopular - and at the time - hideously expensive RDRAM, with the only other option being the cripplingly slow SDRAM 845 chipset. When DDR was finally accepted by Intel, bandwidth was naturally increased two-fold. Asynchronous timings came later and it wasn’t long before the 845 was within a couple of percent of its RDRAM cousin. With the introduction of faster and faster ram, as well as quicker and quicker chips, the 845 has persevered and, if anything, has become the most well liked chipset since the 440BX all those years ago.
In terms of overclocking the 845 has been without peer – and, whilst supposedly faster chipsets from SiS and VIA have come and gone, a well tweaked 845 has pretty much always walloped the competition, especially when using a board manufactured by Abit. Since the first BD7 Abit have been the most popular with the overclockers and the BH7 which we are looking at today is the latest in that series of boards. Designed to run alongside, but not replace, the IT7 Max-II board, the BH7 is almost as feature rich whilst retaining the aging, but for the most part very useful, legacy I/O connections.
Abit have chosen functionality over style with the BH7’s packaging, with their usual blue and black “Give your PC attitude” slogan box making yet another appearance. That has to be the least well thought-out slogan ever, surely a PC without attitude is a stable PC, but then I’m not a marketing guru so what do I know? The contents are well packaged and you get the usual manuals, driver CDs and backing plate. One thing Abit were a bit stingy with was the cables, and you only get one IDE and one serial ATA cable with the BH7 - useless if you happen to want to use both of its 2 regular IDE channels! If they had included a Serillel™ adaptor, as with the IT7 board, it would have been a forgivable omission, but as they haven’t – it’s not.
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