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Posted: April 6th, 2002
Written by: Tuan Huynh
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Features Continued...
In the right corner of the board, you’ll find the usual front panel connectors, as well as a few other nifty things that Abit engineers have included. The little LED readout and 2 buttons under the IDE connectors are power and reset buttons, while the LED read out reports problems with the boot sequence by reporting a hexadecimal number which when looked up in the book will tell you what’s wrong. The buttons and LED readout is part of what Abit calls “Abit Engineered,” no idea why they chose the name, most likely because it’s what they used when the board was still in R&D.
Under the sticker in the top right corner that says BD7-RAID, you’ll find the ATA133 RAID controller. Like every other board from Abit, the BD7-RAID features a Highpoint HPT372 ATA133 controller that supports RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. As you may notice, the 2 bottom yellow IDE connectors are for RAID, but unlike the Promise controllers (with the exception of few); you can use the controllers as a normal ATA133 IDE controller without using the RAID function.
On the far right, you’ll notice the ATX2.03 12 volt connector, the cable is required to be connected or the board will not boot at all. Next to it you’ll notice Abit’s Phase 3 power, which runs cooler and maintains greater stability compared to a Phase 2 power.
On the connector side of the board you’ll find the typical legacy PS2 keyboard, mouse ports, serial, and parallel ports. On the USB side of things, the BD7-RAID features 3 USB ports on the back, rather then 2 like most boards contain. As for onboard Audio, the connectors are stacked upwards much like what we’ve been seeing on the Intel boards.
On the AGP slot, Abit chose to use an AGP retention mechanism that works very much like a DIMM slot. The purpose of the retention mechanism is to lock the AGP card in place so it doesn’t fall out or get loose when the computer is being moved around.
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