ABIT'S MAX line of feature-packed, legacy-reduced motherboards created quite a stir when they were announced, and even reviewed, but some have argued that the market isn't ready to ditch PS/2, serial, and parallel ports just yet. There are apparently a lot of grumpy old men who still want to use their non-USB buck spring keyboards, ancient printers, and PalmPilot cradles. Luckily, Abit hasn't stopped making motherboards with a standard array of legacy ports, and they've just offered up the BD7II-RAID, based on Intel's new 845E chipset for its Pentium 4 processor.

The 845E boasts support for a 533MHz (quad-pumped) system bus and DDR266 memory, but Abit, as always, has a few extra tricks up its sleeve. You'll find onboard Ethernet, audio, and RAID on the appropriately named BD7II-RAID. We also found a way to leverage Abit's excellent SoftMenu III BIOS to gain more memory bandwidth than the 845E chipset is supposed to support.

So how does the BD7II-RAID perform, and just what kind of BIOS trickery did we have to employ to reach a fictitious memory standard called 'DDR356?' Read on and find out.