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Abit IS7 (Springdale) Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Monday, May 26, 2003
Bios Features
The BIOS is pretty cut and dry with many features hidden within submenus throughout the BIOS configuration. After some searching you can usually find what you are looking for.
Softmenu will allow clock frequencies all the way to 300Mhz (x4) FSB though unless you have an unlocked Pentium 4 I doubt you will be reaching those levels with any ease.
Softmenu will allow clock frequencies all the way to 300Mhz (x4) FSB though unless you have an unlocked Pentium 4 I doubt you will be reaching those levels with any ease.
Memory speed is adjustable through some per-determined dividers, Default is auto or 1:1, others include 5:4 and 3:2. Depending on your FSB speed you will need to adjust these to keep your memory speed within tolerances. It would have been nice see the auto adjustment lock the memory speed to whatever the SPD setting was.
AGP and PCI clocks are adjustable in a manner similar to the memory clock, or can be locked at their designed speed.
AGP and PCI clocks are adjustable in a manner similar to the memory clock, or can be locked at their designed speed.
A word on memory
I tried to do this review using the Low Latency TwinX modules but ran into some corruption issues when installing Windows XP that caused a series of random BSOD's. Thinking that maybe the board or memory was bad I decided to increase the memory timings to something a little more modest and sure enough that solved the problem. Not wanting to install the TwinX modules without using them to their full potential they were swapped out for a pair of Corsair XMS3500 modules.
We also noticed a slight bug in memory SPD detection according to what was displayed in the BIOS. It would appear that the BIOS couldn't figure out how fast or slow the memory was since between reboots the displayed values would change. Maybe the Abit BIOS detection is overly sensitive and the memory is at fault or the BIOS screen is just displaying the wrong info, either way it was just something funny to mention.
We also noticed a slight bug in memory SPD detection according to what was displayed in the BIOS. It would appear that the BIOS couldn't figure out how fast or slow the memory was since between reboots the displayed values would change. Maybe the Abit BIOS detection is overly sensitive and the memory is at fault or the BIOS screen is just displaying the wrong info, either way it was just something funny to mention.
These are just some other miscellaneous screenshots.
