Intel 845 Chipset Review & Motherboard Roundup: September 2001

ABIT BL7-RAID

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Always famous for their overclocking options and tweaker mentality, ABIT has done nothing out of the ordinary for their 845 motherboard.  The BL7-RAID gets it s name from the on-board HighPoint HPT370A IDE RAID controller.  As we mentioned in our IDE RAID Comparison, the real benefit of on-motherboard IDE RAID controllers is the ability to boot to your RAID array.  The host CPU still handles all of the calculations involved with the array itself; the HighPoint chip serves as nothing more than a secondary BIOS that allows you to configure a RAID array and boot from it.  The alternative would be to create a RAID array under the Disk Management options in Windows 2000/XP, but the problem there is that you cannot boot from the array.

ABIT's award winning SoftMenu III Jumperless BIOS setup is back, allowing for the usual set of configuration options.  An interesting thing to note is that the AWARD BIOS setup featured a variety of multiprocessor settings while it's obvious that the BL7-RAID is a single processor motherboard.  Could this be a sign of dual processor Pentium 4 workstations soon to come? 

Continuing ABIT's recent tradition, the BL7-RAID features a power and a reset button on the board itself.  This makes testing the board a lot easier as well as any other situation where you're working with the motherboard outside of your case.  The board also features ABIT's two digit POST error code display for quick diagnosing of any problems you may run into.  The board unfortunately won't work without power supplied to its ATX12V power connector, which is the case with almost all Pentium 4 motherboards.