Pentium 4 gained a lot from the market attention lately. As we were able to find out from the Intel Round table held here in Romania Pentium III is no longer manufactured and the actual Celeron will be discontinued early next year. It's not a surprise that Intel doesn't manufacture Pentium III any more, but we found quite interesting that they will renounce to the IA32 traditional architecture Celeron so soon. Of course that there will be a new Celeron, but it will be based on a Pentium 4 core. We were not able to find out if it will be socket compatible with the 478 Pentium 4. We asked the Intel representative about the new DDR Intel platform for Pentium 4 and about its performance. He was not able to tell us exactly when the new chipset will be released on the market, but he knew several things about the performance of the chipset: between 845 and 850. Definitely RAMBUS will still be the highest performance platform for Pentium 4. The next logical question was about the release of a new chipset for RAMBUS. The answer was clear: not soon.
As we have seen in the DFI review the performance of the 845 is far from being on top, making us ask about the legitimacy of a 845 motherboard purchase. Maybe that the new DDR motherboards will bring the necessary value add to Pentium 4 market. But until then 845 motherboards are the only value options from Intel so we will review another 845 motherboard, Abit BL7.

Identification

I was quite satisfied about the Abit TH7-II motherboard, which was reviewed by PC Hardware not long ago. Abit BL7 is based on the same design philosophy and I think that it would be better for you to read the previous article too.
Abit BL7 is shipped with two IDE 100 cables, one floppy cable, one rear panel bracket, one CD with drivers, one floppy disk with HighPoint RAID drivers and a users manual. You don't have to worry about the manual quality because it's more than OK.
The motherboard tested by us was version 1.0. I don't think that there are other versions of this board on the market. There are six PCI slots, 1 CNR, 1 AGP and three memory slots on board, a very good configuration that provides top expandability options. The 845 chip is cooled using a large aluminum heatsink which interferes to the chip using thermal grease and phase change material. I don't know why Abit used two interface materials but it's not the best option. I do not want to explain more, but if you are curious just take a look to coolers article written by our colleague Selenty. The BL7 version tested by us is an "R" and has RAID onboard. We appreciated the IDE connectors which are very close to the motherboard's front edge. This is a good placement option in case you want to minimize clutter, but it requires a larger tower.
Like the TH7-II Abit BL7 features onboard DIP switches, diagnostic BCD and the strange arranged audio ports. Strange is a way of speaking because the sound ports design allows three rear panel USB ports and a networking port. The board tested by us today didn't have onboard LAN. I will not talk about BL7 specific features because these have been already discussed last week. I will rather try to find the weak points of the board's design.
The first problem I was able to find was the position of the CDROM audio headers between the first and the second PCI slot. It's impossible to insert audio cables with the PCI cards on place. The second problem is the well-known memory insertion problem with the AGP card on place. And if you want the third problem we can find one: Abit didn't ship a bracket with an USB port. The board allows only one additional USB port in addition to the ones in the rear and USB header format is not standard. The board has only the 12V connector, but you need a power supply with a 12V header because otherwise the motherboard will not function! Nothing is perfect!

Abit BL7R product picture

Except for the DIP switches there are almost no jumpers onboard. There are two jumpers, one that sets the USB and another that resets the CMOS. Although the board is not small we found that the board has a pretty good design.