ABIT IC7 MAX3 (875P)

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
ABIT
Jun. 22, 2004

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Board Layout and Features

Upon opening the package my attention was immediately grabbed by the shiny blue-anodized aluminum northbridge cooler. The heat-sink is quite large and is actively cooled by a small fan.

Equally hard to miss when looking over this board the OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) cooling duct for the VRU. The OTES unit is made of translucent blue plastic with integrated spring loaded aluminum heat-sinks for the VRU mosfets and a 40mm fan to draw air directly over the VRU and out of the case. Taking up space normally occupied by rear-panel connectors, standard connectors had to be relocated or removed entirely. Specifically, there are no parallel or serial ports onboard. In fact, there aren't even headers so that you might place them elsewhere. Not that I feel these ports will be missed; most any device that would have used those ports are available as USB now.

An Intel 82801ER southbridge is used on the IC7-Max3. This of course supports two SATA ports in RAID 0 and 1 modes.

Abit decided that two SATA ports isn't enough and has added a Silicon Image "SATALink' controller to the board as well. This controller adds 4 more SATA ports with RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 capability.

A Texas Instruments controller provides support for three firewire connections; one on the back panel and two headers on the board.

The back panel is home to four USB ports and there are two headers on the board for a total of eight possible USB connections. Also on the back panel is the Intel CSA gigabit LAN port and the audio jacks with a codec supplied by RealTek. Adding to the growing list of "cool' features on the board is the additional presence of optical out for hooking up that top of the line speaker set.

Abit didn't stick with any particular color scheme with this board. The DIMM slots alternate blue and purple to aid in dual-channel memory setup. The IDE connectors are a teal color and the floppy connector is black. USB headers are blue while the firewire headers are a bright pink color. PCI slots are plain old white and the AGP is the typical brown color. It's almost as if the board was designed with some color-coding scheme in mind as each type of connector has its own unique hue.

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Page 2 of 10

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Board Layout and Features
Page 3: Extras
Page 4: BIOS
Page 5: Test Setup / Benchmarking
Page 6: Benchmarks: PCMark04 / Aquamark 03
Page 7: Benchmarks: Aida32 / Sandra 04
Page 8: Benchmarks: SpecViewPerf 7.1 / ScienceMark 2.0
Page 9: Benchmarks: Winbench 99 / UT2k3
Page 10: Overclocking & Conclusion

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