**OFFICIAL** Abit BG7 (i845G) Thread

[tommyz2kool]

is anyone having stability issues using the 3:4 divider? 160fsb 4:5 is stable enough to run 3dmark, but I cant even boot windows at 150fsb 3:4. is my board defective or is this a fact of life with the bg7? I have a 1.6a that is good to 170fsb, and I have a stick of xms 3200 v 2.1, passed memtest86 @400ddr.

any help will be much appreciated because I really want ddr 400

 

[MeCalvin]

Gururu,
since the day mine floppy drive went down (luckily not during a BIOS flash),
I do everything with a bootable CDRW.

Fast and safe.

I envy you who can do 160fsb at 4:5....

Again another XMS that will not reach DDR400. We are seeing a trend....

 

[mike9390]

160 - 4:5 is better than 150 - 3:4 but you might try using "LOW" - "By SPD". It the same thing as LOW - 3:4 but is more stable on my board. LOW - 3:4 gives me trouble.

Mike

 

[tommyz2kool]

I get instability using low 3:4 or by spd.... I guess 146fsb is not so bad...

 

[mike9390]

Hey guys I was wondering what's the highest you've been able to get your DDR up to? I can do 406 at 2.5/3/3/6 and 2.8v with 256MB of Samsung DTL. Please list your brand, timings and voltage.

Also, has anyone had any problems installing a Ti4400 or Ti4600 with both IDE's being used?

Mike

 

[gururu]

DDR406 (fsb 152; low/by spd, +10% vcore, 1.62 V actual)
2.5/3/3/5
2.5 V BIOS(2.45 V actual)

512 MB VS Corsair 2700 (Samsung K4H560838D TCB3)

 

[The Wildcard]

How does 150 FSB with 1:1 ratio perform compared to other speeds/ratios? Using Samsung DDR 333 Ram here.....

ie. P4 1.6A

133 FSB with 4:5 ratio OR 150 FSB with 1:1 ratio??

 

[beb1]

Hi,
a noobie question.... I just got an Abit BG7 and 1.8a processor ... got it set up and running nice at 133 fsb.

MY question.
At the bottom right hand corner of the m/b there is two led's one says power on led... the other pwr standby led .... my power on led stays green all the time.... even with the computer shut off. The other one (pwr standby led) is off when the computer is off.... but red when it is turned on.

I've read and re-read the manual. Checked and double checked the orientation of the plugs and made sure they were on the right pins. checked everything I could think of. Is this the way it's supposed to be? Or is something screwed up. The computer runs ok, shuts down okay, but that damn red light bothers me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Ben

 

[gururu]

PERFECTLY NORMAL. the green light is an indicator that juice is in the capacitors. try not to add/remove anything from the board while it is green. unplugging it or switching the PS off will turn off the green light...after a few seconds.

the red light just means the computer is on. both lights are diodes so they don't release heat and will 'never' burn out.

 

[Biosmaster]

Running Corsair PC3200 Version 1.1, I hear V2.2 is using Winbond 5.0ns stuff(and sounds great).
CPU 2.26B Malay at 2.82 Vcore 1.65
Memory at 166 3:4 ratio, HW strap low Cas 2 2 2 Sandra 3397 3382
Vdimm 2.7V
Rock solid, the Epox 4G4A would only do DDR 390, and was a bit flaky at that even, and the CPU would only hit 2.67 with 1.85 vcore, I couldnt believe the difference when I popped in the BG7, it doesnt look as fancy as the Epox, the box is plain, but the performance is stellar.Using bios 26 June, when I updated to AH, I had a cold boot issue caused by the vcore not being set correctly at boot.But flashing back has solved that.Has anyone else noticed the vcore dip from a cold boot, just hit dlete and enter the bios and see if it is reading whatever you set it at, mine always defaulted to 1.45 on a cold boot, and tokk quite a bit of quick on and off cycles to get her up.

 

[beb1]

Thanks for the quick answer Gururu. Makes me feel a whole lot better. Now for some serious tweaking. I want to get this puppy running at 2.7 if I can

Thanks again, Ben

 

[Tummy]

Hi all. Well, I got my BG7 back, and sadly, it seems to suffer from the same problem as my GA-8IGX. I'm not sure why nobody else seems to have this problem but me? The BG7 is *slightly* better than my GA board using 2 dimms (if you read page 9 i post my original problem), as it lets me go to 168fsb using both dimms. Again, using each dimm individually seems to have no problem. I picked up a 512mb stick of 333 and that seems to be fine, so i may just stick with that.

One thing I notice that's different between the BG7 and 8igx is that the 8igx seems to let me get my cpu a tad higher stable than the bg7. At what should be the same cpu voltage, 15%/1.725 (i have a 2.26b), the 8igx is seemingly stable at 177 but the bg7 will only get me to 174. I've popped the 8igx back in to retest at 177 but I was sure it worked at that speed okay, but it had soft reboot issues, which the bg7 doesn't. Could this be a result of the supposedly infamous undervolting problem the abit has? Is there any fix for that, other than wire wrapping the cpu?

I tried 177 4:3 on the BG7 but locked up immediately, anybody else have this problem? I'm using the 94 bios. Also wouldn't mind being able to oget 4:5 but am worried about how lucky i will be with that, even to find ram that could do 434. I know right now my ram can't do it but am wondering about the board.

Lastly, stupid newegg didn't send me the retention mechanism, the spdif connector, or the atx backplate. anybody happen to have any of these extra they don't want/need and would be willing to part with?

 

[Tummy]

where did all the bg7 people go?

 

[snoopyb0y]

BIOS ID: AH

1)Support P4 2.8GHz (533MHz FSB) CPU. (CPU ID 0F27 Micro Code)
2)Add SVID and SSID for ICH4 USB 2.0 controller.(SVID:147B,SSID:7403)
3)BIOS compile date: 8/09/2002

Has anyone tried the latest bios and have higher or more stable results overclocking @ 3:4 dividers? I went back to the first bios because the second bios wasn't as stable for me at 4:5

 

[mike9390]

Who is getting a Radeon 9700 Pro besides me? Anand's review was great and after seeing Tom use a BG7 in his 9700 Pro review I'm there dude. What 3DMark2001se score do you think I can get with my 2.26@2.82, DDR400 and a 9700 Pro at 350/700?

Mike

 

[Womba]

Originally posted by: mike9390
Who is getting a Radeon 9700 Pro besides me? Anand's review was great and after seeing Tom use a BG7 in his 9700 Pro review I'm there dude. What 3DMark2001se score do you think I can get with my 2.26@2.82, DDR400 and a 9700 Pro at 350/700?

Mike

Hmm, I think you should get about 16K, for 17K you need over 3Ghz P4.

Damn that waiting. Im getting my 9700 in two weeks. And then starts waiting for DualchannelDDR mobos

 

[gururu]

I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE 9700 EITHER!!!!
It seems like its been soooo long since the first numbers came out.

I think I'll end up getting in the high 12000 to low 13000 in 3DMARK at 1024x768 32 bit

mike9390, you'll probably be 15-16K

 

[5150Joker]

IMO the 9700 is still inadequate for next generation games (e.g. UT2003/Doom 3 engine games). If you notice the benchmarks for UT2003, if AA/AF were to be turned on at say 1280x1024x32 on some levels (dm-inferno, ctf-citadel, dm-antalus) then you'd most likely see fps dips below the 50 fps mark in heavy fighting (maybe even lower). It's very fast at all resolutions without the AA/AF but I'd expect more out of a next gen part--perhaps R350/nv35 will fill that gap. Also, id has mentioned that they just now finally got R300 to work decently at 800x600 for doom 3 due to more stable drivers. I'm beginning to doubt if this card will be fast enough to run that game at 1024x768 and max details. If you have a GF4 Ti series card then I think it'd be prudent to wait on the release of nv35/r350 before upgrading since it seems this R300 part is only really good for current games and right now the Ti4600 does a fine job running today's games with AA/AF turned on at commonly played resolutions (1024x768/1280x1024).

 

[mike9390]

From what i've been able to learn the main problem with the 9700 Pro is today's CPU's just aren't fast enough for it. Over at Rage3D's forum, OpenGL Guy, who works with the 9700 Pro at ATi, said the 9700 Pro would be bottlenecked by the CPU up to 4Ghz. I think he was talking about a Pentium IV's up to 4Ghz.

So by the time Doom]|[ comes out there will be much faster CPU's to take advantage of the 9700 Pro's ability. Plus we will have dual channel DDR motherboards as well. Since the 3.06 PIV and up will have to have a new motherboard anyway we might as well get dual DDR boards. I don't see any reason why a 9700 Pro with mature drivers and a dual DDR333 board with a 3+Ghz PIV, or even AMD's Hammer for that matter, won't be able to play DOOM ]|[ with max detail.

Mike

 

[5150Joker]

Originally posted by: mike9390
From what i've been able to learn the main problem with the 9700 Pro is today's CPU's just aren't fast enough for it. Over at Rage3D's forum, OpenGL Guy, who works with the 9700 Pro at ATi, said the 9700 Pro would be bottlenecked by the CPU up to 4Ghz. I think he was talking about a Pentium IV's up to 4Ghz.

So by the time Doom]|[ comes out there will be much faster CPU's to take advantage of the 9700 Pro's ability. Plus we will have dual channel DDR motherboards as well. Since the 3.06 PIV and up will have to have a new motherboard anyway we might as well get dual DDR boards. I don't see any reason why a 9700 Pro with mature drivers and a dual DDR333 board with a 3+Ghz PIV, or even AMD's Hammer for that matter, won't be able to play DOOM ]|[ with max detail.

Mike

Someone with a 3.6 ghz P4 ran a 3dmark and it topped out around 17k I believe. Although 3dmark2k1 isn't DX9, his pixel shader scores weren't much higher than guys who had p4 2.56-3 ghz cpu's. That leads me to believe that although the card will perform better once cpu's get faster, I doubt it'll give significant improvements in scores. Just to illustrate this further, if you look at the CPU scaling Tom's Hardware using Aquanox (a game that's not very cpu dependant) at 1280x1024x32 you find that the difference in score between a P3 800 and P4 2.53 ghz isn't very much at all. Also, if you look at the UT 2003 cpu scaling anand did at 1280x1024 you find similar results, the max fps levels off after a certain point.

 

[Lizardman]

Originally posted by: 5150Joker

Originally posted by: mike9390
From what i've been able to learn the main problem with the 9700 Pro is today's CPU's just aren't fast enough for it. Over at Rage3D's forum, OpenGL Guy, who works with the 9700 Pro at ATi, said the 9700 Pro would be bottlenecked by the CPU up to 4Ghz. I think he was talking about a Pentium IV's up to 4Ghz.

So by the time Doom]|[ comes out there will be much faster CPU's to take advantage of the 9700 Pro's ability. Plus we will have dual channel DDR motherboards as well. Since the 3.06 PIV and up will have to have a new motherboard anyway we might as well get dual DDR boards. I don't see any reason why a 9700 Pro with mature drivers and a dual DDR333 board with a 3+Ghz PIV, or even AMD's Hammer for that matter, won't be able to play DOOM ]|[ with max detail.

Mike

Someone with a 3.6 ghz P4 ran a 3dmark and it topped out around 17k I believe. Although 3dmark2k1 isn't DX9, his pixel shader scores weren't much higher than guys who had p4 2.56-3 ghz cpu's. That leads me to believe that although the card will perform better once cpu's get faster, I doubt it'll give significant improvements in scores. Just to illustrate this further, if you look at the CPU scaling Tom's Hardware using Aquanox (a game that's not very cpu dependant) at 1280x1024x32 you find that the difference in score between a P3 800 and P4 2.53 ghz isn't very much at all. Also, if you look at the UT 2003 cpu scaling anand did at 1280x1024 you find similar results, the max fps levels off after a certain point.

It was the same way before. Its always been like this the current top line vid cards can only play the current top line games at certain level of detail before they start to dip below 50fps. I dont think things have changed too much.

 

[5150Joker]

Originally posted by: Lizardman

Originally posted by: 5150Joker

Originally posted by: mike9390
From what i've been able to learn the main problem with the 9700 Pro is today's CPU's just aren't fast enough for it. Over at Rage3D's forum, OpenGL Guy, who works with the 9700 Pro at ATi, said the 9700 Pro would be bottlenecked by the CPU up to 4Ghz. I think he was talking about a Pentium IV's up to 4Ghz.

So by the time Doom]|[ comes out there will be much faster CPU's to take advantage of the 9700 Pro's ability. Plus we will have dual channel DDR motherboards as well. Since the 3.06 PIV and up will have to have a new motherboard anyway we might as well get dual DDR boards. I don't see any reason why a 9700 Pro with mature drivers and a dual DDR333 board with a 3+Ghz PIV, or even AMD's Hammer for that matter, won't be able to play DOOM ]|[ with max detail.

Mike

Someone with a 3.6 ghz P4 ran a 3dmark and it topped out around 17k I believe. Although 3dmark2k1 isn't DX9, his pixel shader scores weren't much higher than guys who had p4 2.56-3 ghz cpu's. That leads me to believe that although the card will perform better once cpu's get faster, I doubt it'll give significant improvements in scores. Just to illustrate this further, if you look at the CPU scaling Tom's Hardware using Aquanox (a game that's not very cpu dependant) at 1280x1024x32 you find that the difference in score between a P3 800 and P4 2.53 ghz isn't very much at all. Also, if you look at the UT 2003 cpu scaling anand did at 1280x1024 you find similar results, the max fps levels off after a certain point.

It was the same way before. Its always been like this the current top line vid cards can only play the current top line games at certain level of detail before they start to dip below 50fps. I dont think things have changed too much.

Yes but that's my point exactly. What justifies spending $400 on the 9700 pro right now as opposed to buying a cheap Ti4200 to hold you over until the nv35/r350 come out? The case is even stronger if you already own a radeon 8500 or any of the gf4 ti series cards. The 9700 pro is an excellent card for today's games that will let you take advantage of all it's nice features (AA/Aniso etc) but as soon as the next gen games come out by spring 2003 (and variants based on their engines which usually require even more horsepower) then this card will not let you take advantage of these features at 1280x1024 and higher resolutions. I think it'd be wiser to hold off until the next gen video cards are out. That's my basis for skipping the nv30/9700 parts altogether. The 9700 pro seems like a cheap holdover on ATI's behalf till it puts out the shrinked .13 micron version with DDR-II memory. The same holds for nv30, it's going to be a rushed part (from low yields) available in limited quantities to give nvidia the speed crown again. One may try to argue that this only lends to the perpetual waiting game because something better is always on the horizon but this is a unique case. You don't always have next gen games right around the corner to take advantage of new hardware but in this case you do. So in essence, you'd be paying $400 for a video card that will really only show it's full potential for a span of 6 months or less.

 

[gururu]

Don't know if I want to:
1) drop down 110 dollars for a Ti4200
2) wait 6-9 months
3) drop down another 400 for video

the question is, what is better for ones sanity. Spending 800 over a years period (if necessary) or spending 500 dollars and having to suffer a super long wait. For me I think I'll risk the 9700 and its ability to run DOOM3 as intended, and if it doesn't, then I'll go ahead and buy another card at that time (only a 300 loss). For me, spending 300 is better than drooling for 9 months.

 

[Tummy]

Hi guys. So I seem to have the same problem that Rythan and crapito had before, BUT, the newest bioses don't seem to work for me. (I've tried both)

I have a 2.26 that's stable up to 174, corsair xms3200cas2 that's stable up to about 430 (without the intel INF installed!), but can't work at 4:5 (in fact, have trouble getting to 1:1 at 174 even) when the inf's are installed. I have a stick of samsung 333 sitting here and 1:1 at 174 works fine (the corsair doesn't, weird!), but won't do 4:5.

Is there anything else I could possibly be missing? It'd be so sweetly fast if I could just get this working right..

Thanks...

 

[Psy7th]

Hi all ...

I am very interested in the BG7. It does/has everything I need except that it won't fit my case's IO back panel. I couldn't find out if Abit bundles one with the BG7. I see you guys have had it for quite some time ... so please tell me, does it come with the appropriate back panel ?

Psy7th