Compatibility

845PE doesn’t bring new interesting features to the Pentium 4 market except for the 333Mhz memory support. BE7-RAID is not a motherboard to raise problems from the compatibility point of view because the number of the onboard devices is limited, there are only five PCI slots and the board's design has been already verified with Abit BD7II-RAID. As expected the mobo worked without any problem with all the PCI cards tested. There were no conflicts even when all the PCI slots were in use. The IRQ sharing scheme can be found in the BE7-RAID's manual and it's very useful for the end user. Only four USB 2.0 ports were tested, but they worked perfectly. It’s very nice to play with an IDE-USB enclosure when you have USB 2.0, in fact it’s almost impossible to realize the speed difference between the IDE 133 interface and the USB 2.0.

I was interested in the memory's compatibility because in this area Intel 845PE brings new features. From the silicon point of view the differences between 845E and 845PE are minimal, as you know 845G ran very well with 333Mhz memory modules. Without being very surprised I noticed that Intel didn’t increase the number of memory banks available on 845PE. Unfortunately it will be very hard to use more than 1Gb of memory on 845PE no matter which are the logical limits. Just go and check the market and you will see that the number of unbuffered 1GB DDR2100/2700 modules is very tight.

We checked the board's compatibility with eleven different memory modules. The purpose of these tests was to reveal any potential stability problems with DDR2700/DDR3200 memory modules and aggressive timings. Although not many people use different modules in their systems, we had the slots populated with different memory types in several tests. The BE7 BIOS is able to modify only the basic memory timings. The motherboard was stable with all the memory types and brands, except the KingMax module. Unfortunately we had only one KingMax module in the lab to check. I have tried different settings and memory slots, but the board refused to POST. I am quite sure that the memory module was faulty. It was an early released module and I remember that BE7-RAID was not the first board which refused to post with it.

Check the next page to find out more about the memory stress tests.