The BIOS
Everyone and his mother has tried to emulate Abit's SoftMenu III BIOS interface, and that says a lot about just how powerful a tool it is. As you might expect, the BD7II-RAID features the usual Abit BIOS goodness.

SoftMenu III, limited by the 845E chipset, or is it?

Front side bus speeds between 100 and 250MHz should keep the overclocking crowd satiated, and you're covered for multipliers should you have one of those rare unlocked Pentium 4 engineering samples. If you do take to cranking up the front side bus, you don't have to worry about frying PCI cards, since you can lock down the PCI bus to 44, 37, or 33MHz. You can also choose several host clock dividers.

It's rare that you would ever want to throttle back performance, but the BD7II-RAID does let you set your DRAM frequency at 3/4ths your front side bus speed when you're running a 133MHz bus Pentium 4. This is a great feature for anyone stuck with older PC1600 DDR SDRAM or for those who want to push the front side bus without overclocking the memory. If you're running an older Pentium 4 which uses a 100MHz front side bus, you can also set the DRAM frequency to 4/3rds of the front side bus speed to get PC2100 speeds, something that we'll make far better use of in just a minute.

When overclocking, it always helps to up the voltages a little, and the BD7II-RAID's BIOS lets you adjust CPU voltage to 5%, 10%, or 15% over the stock core voltage. I've seen scores of motherboards with dozens of specific voltage options, and in steps of as little as 0.025V, so it's a little disappointing to see only four real voltage options on the BD7II-RAID. C'mon, Abit! You can do better than that.

You can also raise your DRAM voltage to 2.5, 2.6 or 2.7V, and that's pretty standard as far as motherboards go.

Fairly complete DDR and AGP control

Memory-wise, Abit's SoftMenu III has you covered. I wouldn't mind seeing a few extra memory timing options here, but what's given is certainly ample for all but the most finicky. Just like it should, the BIOS correctly detected our memory's default latency.

Bodging DDR356
Abit's SoftMenu III has a "DRAM Ratio H/W Strap" setting, which is supposed to tell the BIOS which CPU:DRAM dividers it should provide. If you set the H/W Strap to "low," you get the option to set your CPU:DRAM ratio to 3:4. This setting exists to let you set your memory at 133MHz while still running an older Pentium 4 on a 100MHz front side bus. However, if you combine this "low" H/W Strap with a 133MHz Pentium 4, the 3:4 CPU:DRAM ratio yields a 177.3MHz memory bus.

Just a little BIOS fiddling

Look, I just invented DDR356

Is it supposed to work like this? Probably not. The "low" H/W strap is really only meant for Pentium 4s with a 100MHz front side bus. But is it stable anyway? Definitely. The PC2700 DDR SDRAM I have wouldn't run at CAS 2-2-2 on this 178MHz memory bus, but backing off to 2.5-3-3 brought back the board's infallible stability. Given that the PC2700 DDR is only rated at CAS 2.5, I'm happy with the results of this little hack.