If someone asks me which is the 'Top 2002 company' in the IT field I will probably say Intel. There are a lot of reasons for this statement, the most important being the fact that they succeeded to surpass all expectations. The clock speed of the new Intel Pentium 4 processor is faster than expected at the start of 2002, the CPU incorporates the Hyper Threading technology and the new Intel chipsets seem to regain the dominant position on the market. The end of the year is very good for Intel and it’s hard to believe that they will be able to lose this market position in 2003, no matter how active AMD will advertise and market Hammer. Today I will take a look to a motherboard based on 845PE, the Intel chipset that introduces the DDR 333Mhz memory support. The “P” series chipsets followed the Jedec publication of the 333Mhz memory specifications. Once again, Intel releases only fully compliant products.

First look

The motherboard is shipped in the regular Abit box. As I mentioned in my last reviews Abit has two types of boxes: one made of plastic and carton and another one made of carton. The one made of plastic and carton contains boards targeted to the higher segment of the market. BE7-RAID is a mobo for most Pentium 4 users so that Abit packaged it in the regular package. Inside the box I found BE7-RAID revision 1.0, one manual, two UDMA133 cables, one floppy cable, one USB bracket, one ATX shield, one floppy disk containing the RAID drivers and one CD with drivers. The user’s manual is like all new Abit manuals, very comprehensive and easy to understand even for novice users.

The motherboard has five PCI, one AGP and three DDR slots. 845PE is cooled by a large heatsink, no active cooling is required. BE7-RAID comes with onboard audio and LAN. There are no astonishing features onboard like Serial ATA or Firewire. 845PE doesn’t come with onboard video like 845PG, but this is preferable for enthusiasts. The audio is based on Realtek ALC650 and supports five analog ports and one digital audio output. The LAN is based on Realtek RTL8100B and provides good cross platform compatibility. The ATX power headers are placed in good positions. The main ATX power header may increase the dificulty of the motherboard’s installation in small to medium sized cases because large 5.25” devices (CD drives for example) can reach the board. There are three fan headers onboard, one very close to the CPU socket, one near the fifth PCI slot and another one in a pretty unpleasant position between the third and the forth PCI slot.

Abit BE7-RAID product picture

Although the motherboard has only two USB ports on rear, there are two additional headers onboard which can accommodate other four ports. The placement of these headers is very good because it maximizes the airflow in the case. If you have a lot of PCI cards in the system and you want to use two USB brackets you will have to place the USB brackets in the first PCI cards’ locations.
Overall Abit BE7-RAID has a very nice design. It may look simplistic, but there are only a few uninspired things in its layout. The board looks very well for overclockers and enthusiasts who want to add their own toys into the system. The setup is totally jumperless, but there are no diagnostic features onboard. I also have to note that this is the first board I was able to saw in the last months which didn’t suffer from DIMM insertion problems.