The design of motherboard Abit BH7 as a whole corresponds to referens-design of similar products.

It is necessary to mark, that the design of motherboards is recommended the corporations developing and releasing sets of the system logic. In this case such initiative belongs to the implementator of a chip set i845PE — Intel companies.

It is especially important to follow guidelines and referens-design in engineering of the most critical areas of the motherboard on which are allocated the processor plug, chip MCH, units of dynamic storage and AGP plug.

Besides, for support of productivity and stability of system operation the design and quality of manufacture of the motherboard in areas where the high-speed buses characterised by high frequencies are allocated are important. These buses joint the specified components which are a part of the architecture of the motherboard.

Here it is necessary to pay attention to a popular belief, that card Abit BH7 represents the simplified, dispersed variant of card Abit IT7-MAX2. It is possible to be convinced Of an inaccuracy of the given statement, comparing sites of the given cards on fig. 6 and 7 on which fragments of buses of processors FSB are resulted.

On the resulted fragments it is visible, that design of processor buses for these cards absolutely different. By the way, it is necessary to mark, what exactly the design of processor bus Abit BH7 has allowed to realise frequency potential of chip MCH which is a part of a chip set i845PE in any measure.

Except design of buses and a chip set, reaching of a quiescent operation of components of the motherboard is promoted by the qualitative converter of power (VRM), constructed on the fourline circuit and containing eight capacitors in size 3300 mkf and three on 1200 mkf.

In the motherboard architecture units of different manufacturers are used. Except chips of Intel and Abit, here it is possible to find products of such corporations, as RealTek, Avance Logic (division RealTek), Winbond and others. As an example it is possible to result chips of the six-channel sound codec (ALC650), the network controller (RTL8101) and Super I/0 (Winbond W83627HF-AW). Last, by the way, provides functions of the hardware monitoring providing the control over a supply voltage, temperature and rotation of cooling fans: three fans, the processor and system temperature, nine supply voltages, including even the control over battery CMOS. By the way, there is a possibility of a speed control of rotation of the processor fan — parametre “Smart Fan Speed Control”.

Integrated into structure of motherboard ABIT BH7 network tools allow to include easily the computer through built in RJ-45 plug in local area network structure.

Certainly, motherboard resources provide support of consecutive bus USB 2.0. This, already habitual possibility is presented by six ports, four of which are installed on a backboard, and others two are hooked up with the help breketa. Unfortunately, breket in a package does not enter.

Some words about a disk subsystem. In addition to the traditional controller IDE, allowing to hook up to four arrangements ATAPI (IDE), support of one channel Serial ATA is provided. It is provided by means of controller Marvell 88i8030. However, usage Serial ATA is carried out at the expense of arrangements ATAPI which quantity is reduced to three. By the way, plugs of parallel interface ATAPI are installed in a parallel way card planes that eliminates negative influence of wide wires of a disk subsystem on air cooling in a computer system unit. The probability of damage of the card because of its dangerous deflection besides, decreases at hooking up to it of cables IDE.

All customisations are carried out in BIOS Setup. Except traditional parametres, there is a possibility of change of installations for units of dynamic storage and, of course, dispersal. Rich resources of dispersal allow to change clock rate of the processor bus and a supply voltage. Thus frequency can be changed from 100 to 250 MHz with step 1 MHz. The power can be changed power supply of a kernel of the processor on 5, 10,15, 20, 25, 30 %. Besides, there is a possibility of increase in power on memory modules: from 2,55 to 3,05 In with step 0,05 In, and also on the videoadapter: 1,5 In and 1,6 Century

The resources of dispersal realised in card Abit BH7, allow to provide high levels of productivity and stability of operation not only in regular, but also in the forced modes.

Estimating performance levels, accessible with new high-powered processors, it is necessary to mark, that high transmission frequencies of data, characteristic for modern systems, lead to considerable limitation of freedom of implementators of motherboards. Moreover, for a quiescent operation the design of any motherboard should correspond to a number of requirements. These requirements follow, by the way, from physics and features of engineering of high-frequency arrangements. For simplification of engineering as it was marked above, there is a measurement standard — the referens-design regulating, even quantity and a site of transitions between card layers. For this reason productivity of systems with motherboards about equal quality and one price category and, of course, created on the basis of identical chip sets, as a rule, is practically identical (under condition of identical complete sets of systems and parametres of customisations). As a result of difference in productivity keep within usually a five-percentage band. But it is frequent also this band it is reduced in process of perfection by implementators of program code BIOS and drivers.

Nevertheless, for an illustration of excellence of motherboard Abit BH7 the digits characterising productivity of system, created on the basis of this card are more low presented.

In testing following components used:

• The processor of Intel Celeron (100 MHz FSB of type QPB, 128 Kbytes of kesh-memory L2, Socket 478 plug ) with clock rate of 2,0 GHz;
• Motherboards Abit BH7 (i845PE) and ABIT IT7-MAX2 Rev.2.0 (i845PE);
• Abit Siluro GeForce4 Ti4200 OTES videoadapter (64 Mb DDR SDRAM, frequency GPU — 257 MHz, a video memory — 550 MHz);
• IBM hard disk 180GXP 120 Gbytes (2 Mb of kesh-memory, 7200 rpm);
• OS OF WINDOWS XP Professional.

Productivity metrics in the test 3DMark 2001 SE

In the course of card testing have shown practically equal, within a measurement error, productivity metrics on a wide spectrum of tests.