ABIT BD7II-RAID

ABIT BD7II-RAID Scoring
Feature set	C
Performance	B+
Stability	A

BD7II-RAID

HighPoint controller

First impressions left us a little disappointed as we opened the box because it felt a little empty compared to the other boards in this roundup. We couldn't' find any extra incentives that are included with the board. One could argue that ATA RAID and integrated Ethernet are included but these features are also standard on the other boards in the roundup.

Board Features

Taking a closer look at the board, we see the use of Realtek hardware to power both LAN as well as audio while a HighPoint controller handles software ATA RAID tasks. While the HighPoint controller supports more features, Promise's controller has a few key advantages: low pin-count ASIC and better RAID performance. On the manufacturing side of things, you might be interested to know that ABIT doesn't build its own boards. ECS is the company that builds ABIT's boards. That being said, it's also interesting to note that ECS doesn't have quite a name for high-quality boards although they do produce in massive volumes. During testing however, we didn't encounter anything out of the ordinary and everything worked well. Performance was good and overall board features were decent. Board layout however, could have used a few changes: we wish that the 4-pin ATX12V power supply connector was closer to the 20-pin ATX12V connector.

RealTek LAN

Ports

Overclocking and performance

The BD7II-RAID performs quite well in most of our tests and was also a fantastic overclocker. Inside the BIOS is a barrage of features including the ability to set PCI/AGP dividers that help ensure all your expansion cards stay stable.

The quiz related to this article is inactive, check out these other available quizzes!
[ View current quizzes! ]