The layout
With few integrated peripherals to worry about, Abit's engineers should have had no problem fitting everything onto the board.

The BH7's layout is nice and clean, though I prefer that power connectors be placed as close to the top edge of the board as possible. No, the placement of the four-pin auxiliary ATX power connector doesn't cause any major problems, but internal cable routing would be cleaner if the plug was along the board's top edge.

Abit's gone with a reddish orange board color for the BH7, and I have to admit that I like it a lot. Everyone and his mother seems to be doing red components these days, so the BH7's subtle orange tint gives the board a more unique flavor. What's more, you won't find anything neon-colored on the board at all. I think we can all be happy about that.

To make the board more stable when overclocked and also compatible with Intel's latest batch of Pentium 4 processors that run on an 800MHz front-side bus, Abit has gone all out with a four-phase power solution on the BH7. Will it really be stable with one of those swanky new Pentium 4 3.00GHz chips on an 800MHz front-side bus? We'll soon find out.

With only five PCI slots and plenty of extra room on the board, Abit's engineers had no problem keeping tall components and DIMM slots away from the AGP slot. A few capacitors come close to interfering with longer graphics cards, but they don't really get in the way. And since there's plenty of room between the AGP and DIMM slots, memory can be easily installed and removed without touching the graphics card.

Honestly, I'm a bit torn over the BH7's complement of only five PCI slots. Since the board lacks many of the integrated peripherals enthusiasts have begun taking for granted, it's likely that many of its PCI slots will actually be used. Those looking to build a peripheral-packed system may even run out of PCI slots on the BH7. The board's five PCI slots should just be enough for most enthusiasts, though.

Pay close attention to the lower left-hand corner of the above picture; it may be the last time you see a motherboard with unoccupied board real estate.

The fact that the BH7 has unpopulated board real estate is strange enough on its own, but the board has at least one other oddity. Instead of mounting the IDE ports face-up like everyone else, Abit has mounted them along the board's edge, which makes it easier to cleanly route IDE cables away from the board.

Since the BH7 lacks integrated IDE RAID, the mobo has only two IDE connectors to worry about. Both of those can be easily squeezed along the board's edge to keep ribbon clutter to a minimum.

Along the port backplane, Abit doesn't have any big surprises. Those planning to use the board's integrated six-channel audio will appreciate the full suite of analog and digital S/PDIF input and output ports, though. Abit also provides four USB 2.0/1.1 ports right on the board, although a PCI expansion header to access the board's auxiliary USB ports wasn't provided in the box. With many of today's cases offering front-mounted USB ports, it shouldn't be difficult for enthusiasts to rig up access to the extra ports.