No matter how hard AMD tried to improve the Athlon core, Intel still manufacturers the fastest x86 CPU on the market. A lot of people do not need a 3.0Ghz CPU, but they require a quality platform. When Intel designed the DDR platform they introduced the 845G chipset to compete with other manufacturers on the integrated computers market. The Intel 845GE chipset was designed to replace the 845G. However the architecture differences between the two chipsets are minimal. Beside the official support for Hyper Threading there are no reasons why someone would want to replace an old 845G motherboard. For manufacturers it’s very easy to change the board's design to accommodate the new chipset revision because Intel provisions all these changes to have a minimal impact on his direct clients, the motherboard manufacturers. Today I will take a look to a motherboard designed around 845GE, the Abit BG7E.

First look

The board is shipped in the standard Abit box. Inside the box you can find the mobo, the user’s guide, one CD with drivers and utils, one USB bracket, one floppy cable, one IDE cable and the ATX shield. As you can see the package is rather modest considering other Abit packages, but that’s normal considering the board's target. From the user’s guide quality perspective there are not many differences between the Abit boards. The BG7E users manual is good; it describes the motherboard's installation in several languages and the BIOS settings and drivers installation in English only. The board has five PCI slots, one AGP and three DDR slots. On board there can be found a six channels sound solution, a Fast Ethernet port and the integrated video port. The board doesn’t come with Serial ATA, RAID, Firewire or other more or less exotic gadgets, but it delivers a basic feature set for regular home users.

The board's layout is traditional. BG7E has two power headers. The main one is located near the memory slots, in a very good location and the 12V one is positioned near the GMCH. We can find three fan headers on board, two of them are very close to the CPU socket and the third one is located near the IDE connectors. The board is able to accommodate six USB ports, four ports being available on headers. Quite interesting the board doesn’t suffer from DIMM insertion problems. Abit uses Realtek chips in order to provide the audio and LAN functions, no matter if we discuss about low end or high end motherboards. Regular PC Hardware readers know that I have "the odd behavior" to underline the bad things in the boards' design. In this case I was not able to find the weak points in Abit BG7E's design. Due to the fact that Abit didn’t include too many additional onboard devices, the board looks very much like the old, tough, designed for overclocking boards. I would have liked even more BG7E's design if the IDE connectors had been placed in the front of the DIMM slots.
On the 845 chip you can find a large heatsink and no fan. The chip doesn’t get too hot so that the Abit cooling solution is good. The passive cooling is recommended when possible because it increases reliability (no moving parts are involved).

Abit BG7E product picture

The only jumpers available onboard are used to setup the sound source or to clear the CMOS. In order to facilitate the testing of the motherboard Abit was kind enough to include two DIP switches, one for reset and another one for power-on. A buzzer was also integrated onboard so that it’s not necessary to have a case speaker for sound error output.