Abit Socket 478 TH7-II-RAID - mainboard - ATX - i850

...receiving 1.55v.

Abit have been releasing BIOS every few months (latest is th7heh released 14/10/03) supporting newer CPU's and fixing bugs but they seem to forget about updating the Highpoint. Luckily it is easy to use CBROM to modify the BIOS file yourself and add in the BIOS from Highpoint's website. 2.351 is the latest at the moment. You should have no problems with the Highpoint as long as you keep it updated and make sure the driver ...
.../> You can download the latest chipset drivers from Intel's website along with the latest Intel application accelerator (posh name for an ide driver). There is a great scene on the internet for this board and lots of modified BIOS's are available offering extra settings, higher voltages for CPU overclocking and other cool stuff.

Bad things?
USB is only v1.1 which means 11mbps - slow. I disabled it in the BIOS and added a seperate ... more

After upgrading from a trusty P3-500 to an AMD Athlon 1.4GHz I found pressing the reset button every few minutes to be a real pain so I went back to Intel. I wanted a reliable system that was fast, clockable and futureproof. It also had to be rock solid and stable as well. Looking around everyone was saying good things about the TH7-II so I decided to buy one and give it a go.

This board didn't come cheap. When you add Rambus RIMMS and a P4 processor in as well it was pretty expensive. But I was so annoyed with how unreliable my previous system was I bought it anyway and sold the Athlon and VIA based motherboard to a mate for £50.

This board is Abit's i850 chipset solution featuring 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP, 4 slots for Rambus rimms and 2 Highpoint HPT370 IDE channels in addition to the 2 standard IDE channels. The Highpoint has its own BIOS and offers RAID support.

No problems with installation - I used boxed Intel CPU's and the heatsink/fan units were easy to clip down. Just a matter of pushing two levers! I did scrape off the Intel thermal compound and added a thin layer of artic silver all over the top of the CPU. The Rambus rimms slotted in just like good old Dimms. They have built in heatsinks as they get quite hot. I used 4x 128mb rimms to keep costs down. This gave me 512mb of RAM. If you only use 2 rimms, you will need to use the C-Rimms (continuity rimms) to terminate the other 2 empty slots. These are included with the board. The Rambus memory is fast - equivalent to PC3200! You need to use matched pairs though and 128mb are the best value. 256mb isn't too bad but 512mb is very expensive.

I disabled the built in sound immediately, and used a Creative SoundBlaster Live 5.1 Platinum. Since I've never used the built in one, I can't comment on it. Generally though they are not up to the standard of the high end Creative cards.

I installed 2x 200gig IBM 7200rpm deskstars on the primary standard ide, and a dvd writer and cd writer on the secondary standard ide. On the Highpoint I installed 4x 200gig IBM 7200rpm desktars (primary ide master+slave and secondary ide master+slave). I use them as extra drives only, not as RAID. This is because if you upgrade the highpoint BIOS it can sometimes break the RAID stripe. I didn't want to risk that. This board supports ATA100 max. ATA133 drives work fine, but you will only get ATA100 transfer speeds through the bus.

This board started life with a socket 478 Pentium4 Williamette processor at 1.5GHz. This lasted me for a while, and ran happily when clocked with a 110fsb x4 which gave 1650MHz. The memory clock was always 400 (440 when overclocked). I used 512MB of Samsung PC800 Rimms. I used a GeForce3 with this setup.

When it was time to upgrade, a 2GHz Williamette was used, along with a GeForce4 Ti4600. This provided a noticable boost in speed and again ran happily clocked with a 110fsb (2.2GHz !).

I've just upgraded again to a 3GHz Northwood CPU which 512k of cache and HT support. Graphics card is now a Geforce 5950. This 533fsb based CPU required manual settings in the BIOS - 133mhz x23 multiplier. The P4 uses a quad pumped bus so this resulted in 533 for the fsb. I have dropped the memory clock down from 400 to 300 to keep things reliable. At 400 the memory was running at 133x4 (532MHz) which was way over spec and resulted in errors. At 300 it was running at 133x3 (399MHz) which was absolutely fine. I kept the PCI/AGP clock at FIX (33/66). So far so good. No CPU overclocking done yet!

One thing I have noticed with this board is that it tends to undervolt the CPU. With each CPU used, I have had to set the voltage manually in the BIOS. I always have it 0.1 or 0.15v above normal in order to get the CPU to run at the standard voltage. With the new 3GHz Northwood it is set at 1.7v although hardware doctor shows it is only really receiving 1.55v.

Abit have been releasing BIOS every few months (latest is th7heh released 14/10/03) supporting newer CPU's and fixing bugs but they seem to forget about updating the Highpoint. Luckily it is easy to use CBROM to modify the BIOS file yourself and add in the BIOS from Highpoint's website. 2.351 is the latest at the moment. You should have no problems with the Highpoint as long as you keep it updated and make sure the driver files and BIOS are always the latest ones!

You can download the latest chipset drivers from Intel's website along with the latest Intel application accelerator (posh name for an ide driver). There is a great scene on the internet for this board and lots of modified BIOS's are available offering extra settings, higher voltages for CPU overclocking and other cool stuff.

Bad things?
USB is only v1.1 which means 11mbps - slow. I disabled it in the BIOS and added a seperate PCI addon card giving USB2 and firewire support.
A 10/100 LAN is supposed to be built-in but I don't know anyone who actually got this. That means another PCI slot was taken up with a gigabit ethernet card.
The chipset and BIOS doesn't support HT (hyper-threading). This doesn't stop you using HT CPU's it just means you can't enable HT.
Prescott CPU's and the new P4's with 800MHz FSB won't work.
Max AGP transfer speed is AGP 4x. AGP 8x cards still work, but at the slower speeds.

Overall this board really qualifies as a classic. It's not cheap but you get what you pay for. Reliability and stability as well as some serious overclocking and support from the old 1.5GHz Williamettes to 3.06GHz Northwoods!

***Update for December 2006***
I'm still using this board in my gaming system - it continues to offer performance and reliability. This board first came out in 2001 (check the reviews on the Internet) so I have definitely had value for money. The 3GHz Northwood is the best CPU this board will take, so my other upgrade options consisted of the RAM and the graphics card. I now have 2GB of PC800 direct Rambus RAM and a 512MB Gainward Geforce 7800GS+ AGP graphics card.

Although Rambus is fast, it does have high latency. The more of it you have, the more the latency issue becomes apparent. I was expecting a big boost upgrading from 512MB to 2GB - unfortunately the speed boost wasn't all that noticable. The latency issue means it takes longer to find the information, but once it does it transfers it very quickly. The more memory, the longer it takes to locate the data. With 512MB there are no noticeable latency issues. Upgrading to 1GB is probably the better option for a performance balance. With 2GB of RAM and the Rambus clock speed set down to 300, benchmarking software will show up latency lag times. On the plus side, the hard disk activity definitely dropped due to all the extra caching done in RAM so this certainly helped. Overclocking the system also dropped memory latency lag times.

The good old 350W Enermax PSU kept everything up and running until the Geforce 7800 was slotted in - the system kept crashing and shutting down at that point. It just couldn't cope with the large power draw required by the card. The Enermax was replaced with a 520W Trust PSU which had SATA power connectors and a dedicated PCI Express type power connector in addition to the standard floppy and hard disk power plugs. I was able to feed the power hungry Geforce 7800 directly from this PCI Express cable and everything is stable now.

Newer PSU's don't come with the ATX AUX power connector present on the TH7-II. It provided additional 3.3 and 5v power to the board. I was slightly concerned at first that the board may not function at all without this - luckily it doesn't require it. The A-Bit Hardware Doctor software was beeping warnings at me that there was no -5V feed but I turned off the warning and everything has been fine so far. Checking the ATX specs on the Internet it appears that the old Aux connector has been phased out!

The system is running overclocked permanently now - nothing too crazy though as I need it to be reliable. The Front Side Bus (FSB) is at 140MHz instead of 133 which pushed the AGP to 70MHz (up from 66) and the PCI to 35MHz (up from 33). The CPU is running at 3220MHz (up from 3059) and the Rambus RIMMS are running at 140x3, giving 420MHz (up from 399). The CPU power feed is set at 1.6v although Hardware Doctor shows it hovering around 1.45 - 1.49v. The Northwood CPU is rated at 1.55v max. It has been totally stable using these turbo settings.

Pushing the FSB to 150MHz is generally as high as this board can go before things start crashing. At that speed the memory will be at 450MHz, the PCI at 37.5MHz and the AGP at 75MHz. The CPU will be at 3450MHz and will almost certainly require the power to be set at 1.7v (giving around 1.55). It's good to know I have that extra boost in case it's needed.

I'll probably look at upgrading the hard disks and CD/DVD writers next. SATA 300 is much quicker than the old ATA100 kit I am using at the moment. I'll need a PCI expansion card though, which offers SATA 300 support. Something to check out for a future project.

As far as benchmarking results go, 3DMark'06 gets 4088 (SM2 1868, HDR/SM3 2027, CPU 857). 3DMark'05 gets 5980. 3DMark'03 gets 14279. PCMark'05 gets 3429 (CPU 3724, Memory 3436, Graphics 5213, HDD 4639). In all cases the pro/advanced version was used with a full set of tests selected and performed at 1024x768 32bit colour.

What can I say - this board rules!

**Update December 2009**

Several of the capacitors on this board are bulging, meaning it could fail at any moment. The board has lasted a long time -almost 7 years- and has served me well. I've reset the CPU to standard clock speeds and voltages and moved it into another machine where it currently runs Openfiler - a freeware Linux SAN for playing about with. 

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