The board
The BG7 board we're looking at today is an engineering sample, although it looks polished enough that it can't be too far away from final production boards. This sample still has a couple of rough edges, however. The early drivers Abit supplied for the built-in Intel Audio wouldn't install properly in Windows XP, and the on-board Realtek Ethernet controller failed intermittently. Abit had an updated BIOS and drivers that would presumably address such issues, but we weren't able to test them in time for this article. Nevertheless, the board worked right otherwise, and it was very stable once configured properly.

CPU supportSocket 478-based CPUs, including Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB
Form factorATX
ChipsetIntel 845G (82845G MCH, 82801DB ICH4)
InterconnectIntel Accelerated Hub (266MB/s)
PCI slots5
AGP slots1, 2X/4X AGP w/sidebanding and fast writes
AMR/CNR slotsNone
Memory3 184-pin DIMM sockets of PC1600/2100 DDR SDRAM
Storage I/OFloppy disk
2 channels ATA/100 (ICH4)
Ports1 PS/2 keyboard, 1 PS/2 mouse,
1 serial, 1 parallel, 2 USB

1 line out , 1 line in, 1 mic in,
1 woofer/center channel via included expansion header
for AC'97 audio

1 RJ-45 Ethernet

BIOSAward PnP with SoftMenu III
Bus speeds400MHz-1000MHz in 1MHz increments
MonitoringVoltage, fan status, and temperature monitoring


The BG7 motherboard: nothing too fancy

The BG7's layout is no-nonsense. The board has five PCI slots, three DIMM slots, and plenty of room around the processor for a heat sink/fan combo. The only place we found tight quarters was at the IDE ports. The capacitors on our GeForce4 Ti 4600 card were cramped in just above the IDE connectors. We kind of like this compromise, though, because there's plenty of room to swap out DIMMs without removing the AGP card—a rare attribute in today's mobos.

The port cluster at the back edge of the board is notable for its completeness. You get graphics, sound, networking, dual ports for USB 2.0, and all the usual suspects. Abit sacrifices one of the old-style serial ports for the VGA connector, but there's no hint of the legacy-free push from Abit's MAX series working here.


Ports for everything