ABIT sent us this board a month ago but we actually didn’t get a chance to look at this until now. The BG7E comes in a standard motherboard packaging. The packaging includes everything you’ll need to get yourself going with this board in a new ATX case. You'll find the board, a CD full of drivers, a well written manual, IDE cables, PCI USB connectors, and an I/O shield.

The ABIT BG7E box	Looking inside	Here are the pieces

Layout

After taking the motherboard out, the first thing that I noticed was the very clean layout. The BG7E is an ATX form factor motherboard and makes good use of the available space. Here are a couple of pictures of the motherboard.

Overhead shot of the motherboard

You’ll notice that the capacitors around the processor section do not overly crowd it. This is always a welcome sight to those of you who have a tendency of bending capacitors while installing heatsinks.

CPU Area

The power supply connectors are in a slightly awkward location with the four pin connector below the processor and the 20 pin connector to the right of the processor. This will require some careful wiring of the power cords since we’d prefer not running a cable over the CPU fan. It would have been nice if the power connectors were placed along the top edge of the board instead of to the right and lower left side of the processor.

Power Connector layout

While we’re on the subject of connectors, the IDE connectors are on the lower right hand corner of the motherboard. The floppy connector is below the IDE connector at a 90 degree angle to the IDE connectors. Depending upon the type of case that you use, you may end up needing a long floppy cable to reach the bottom of the motherboard. Those of you with tower cases will also probably need long IDE cables to reach to your IDE drives.

IDE and Floppy Connectors

There are five PCI slots and one AGP 4X slot on the motherboard in case you will need to expand beyond the existing capabilities of this board. The AGP slot has a nice locking clip/lever that lets you secure your AGP video card into place. It’s also usable as a mechanism by which to unseat your video card when you want to change it. But DO remember that the locking clip is there otherwise you’ll rip it off if you’re removing your AGP card.

Five PCI slots

PCI and AGP slots	The AGP Locking Clip

You’ll notice that ABIT placed a passive heatsink on the northbridge of the i845GE chipset. Here are pictures of both the northbridge section and the southbridge (ICH4) component. We've also included a picture of the Realtek Network Controller.

Passive Heatsink on the northbridge	Southbridge

The Realtek Controller

On the upper right hand side, you will find the three DDR memory slots that are capable of taking up to DDR 333 (PC 2700) memory chips. The maximum amount of memory that this board supports is 2GB of DDR memory. Given that you will max out at 2GB of supported memory, this board is definitely catered to the general enthusiast audience as opposed to a high end graphics or video editing or workstation audience.

Some final thoughts on the layout of the motherboard. Notice the tabs on the jumpers? They are extra long. How many of you lose your fingernails trying to pull a tab off of a jumper? ABIT uses nice extra long (and yellow!) tabs so you should have no problems at all removing them and putting them wherever you want..

CMOS Reset Jumper

ABIT also includes two buttons on the motherboard to allow you to reset and power on/off the board. This is great for enthusiasts looking for a way to turn this board on without connecting the case leads to the board.

Buttons on the board - sweet

Curious about on board audio connectors? Here's the CD and AUX connectors

CD and AUX connectors

Finally here are some snapshots of the rear I/O ports of the motherboard. As you can see, there are plenty of ports that will require that I/O shield that ABIT provides.

I/O Ports

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