Last week we took a look to the new 845 chipset from Intel incarnated in a DFI motherboard. We discovered the overclocking power of the new Pentium IV 478 socket CPU and the new memory handling methods build into 845 chipset. The benchmarks didn't show amazing results mainly because 845 used SDRAM memory and the bandwidth was limited. Today we will give a try to the 850 chipset which uses RAMBUS memory and offers a better performance. The first board we will try today is manufactured by a world known manufacturer: Abit. The motherboard is called Abit TH7II RAID and it's a successor of the TH7, the 850 based board for Pentium4 socket 423.

Identification

The board package is impressing; once again Abit doesn't disappoint us from this point of view. Inside the box we were able to find a version 1.0 of the Abit TH7II, two IDE 100 cables, one floppy cable, one game adapter bracket, two C-RIMM modules, a CD with drivers, one floppy disk cable with HighPoint drivers, one thermal cable, one ATX back panel and the user's manual. The user's manual is very well documented, containing info about physical installation, BIOS settings, RAID BIOS, drivers installation and BIOS update procedure. The manual is not the best ever seen at PC Hardware in the last months, but it's very close to the best one.
The motherboard has 1AGP/5 PCI/1 CNR and four RIMM slots, providing good expandability options. Personally I would have liked to see the sixth PCI slot and no CNR, but nothing is perfect :). The AGP slot has the AGP card retention mechanism.

It's useless to talk about the free space around the CPU socket because the Pentium 4 retention mechanism imposes a standard in heatsink size. The ATX and one additional power header are placed very well, close to the memory slots. The 12V ATX power connector is not placed in a very good position, but its cable has only four wires and doesn't limit the airflow. TH7II has AC97 onboard sound, but the format of the sound outputs is a little bit different from the regular; these are in line and perpendicular to the board surface. There are versions of the TH7II which come with onboard LAN, one of the reasons why Abit thought to another format for the sound outputs. That's why they included in the box an ATX back panel, because the format of the rear outputs is different.

Very interesting, the board has three USB ports on back panel. Onboard there is also a header with two other ports, but the bracket is not supplied.
I found very useful the new diagnostic tool found on Abit TH7II RAID. Until recently Abit motherboards didn't include an onboard diagnostic tool like Epox or MSI motherboards. Fortunately they thought to this problem and solved it. Abit TH7II RAID includes a two seven segments display very much like the one found on Epox boards. The display is able to show about fifty error codes and it's very useful in case of motherboard problems. Actually the BCD does not display an error, but a hexa code corresponding to a BIOS subroutine call. The codes move very quickly and you can not read them, but if the motherboard freezes you can see the code displayed. All you have to do is to look into the manual and track the problem.

Near the BCD there are two small buttons, one for power-on and one for reset. I think that Abit thought to me when they included these buttons; I am getting tired to use the screwdriver to power on or reset the testing computer :). Great feature.
The mobo includes three fan headers, two of them being close to the CPU socket. I am not aware of any cooler for Pentium 4 which uses two fans, but it's good to have the headers there.

There are not many jumpers on board and the most obvious are the DIP switches. Actually these are not quite jumpers, but have the function of a jumper forest. Their location is not very inspired but as we will see later you won't have to work with them if you don't want to.
The wake headers are well placed because you don't need to remove PCI cards in order to remove or insert the wake-on cables.