Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

ABIT BD7-RAID

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ABIT has come a very long way since the days of the IT5H and AX5, two of the boards that truly put them on the map in the enthusiast world. The BD7-RAID is another solid production from ABIT. The board features 6 PCI slots, three USB ports on the back of the board and onboard ATA-133 RAID. The RAID is driven by HighPoint's HPT372 controller and has a very flexible BIOS setup.

The HPT372 supports ATA-133 transfer rates

Creating a RAID array (0, 1 or 0+1) is simple and adjusting stripe sizes is easy as well. The only fault we found here is that the controller only supports a maximum of a 64KB stripe size which is somewhat small by today's standards. We'd like to see support for 128KB block sizes at least but preferably much larger than that. The board is available without RAID as well.

The HPT372 RAID controller features a handy Windows configuration utility

The ALC200 audio codec produced 2-channel audio that was just fine for basic Windows audio needs as well as for music playback. Hard-core gamers and those that use their PCs for DVD playback will want to opt for hardware 4 or 6 channel audio using an external card, but for everyone else the onboard sound should work just fine.

The board's two DIMM slots are completely in compliance with Intel's spec for the DDR 845 platform. The SoftMenu III jumperless setup controls the CPU clock multiplier, FSB and all of the voltage settings. ABIT even offers the ability to fix the PCI operating frequency to 33MHz regardless of what the FSB frequency is. With the BD7-RAID this feature is not that useful since you rarely get to a high enough FSB frequency that the PCI bus runs too far out of spec.

ABIT does bundle the BD7-RAID with a number of software titles such as Norton AntiVirus 2002 but unfortunately these are all the limited versions which can be downloaded online for free anyway.

We had no problems during our testing of the board.