ABIT IC7 MAX3 (875P)

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
ABIT
Jun. 22, 2004

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Extras

Outside of the many extras on the board itself, Abit included pretty standard fare with the IC7-Max3. There are four SATA cables, rounded IDE and floppy cables, two Y adapters for splitting a single Molex connector into two SATA power connections. If your case is lacking front (or top as the case may be) panel connectors, there is a PCI slot-bracket adapter with a standard firewire connection, a mini firewire connection and two USB ports. A sticker is also included as a quick reference for jumper settings while you are mucking around inside the case.

There is a Quick Install Guide included with IC7-Max3 that covers the basics in multiple languages. You could throw this guide away however as the information contained in it, in all languages, is repeated in the User's manual. The manual is probably the best I have seen bundled with a motherboard. It covers the pin-outs for all headers, jumpers and connectors and goes into a fair amount of detail for each BIOS setting. Install procedure for ach individual software and driver package is also covered step-by-step with screenshots. The manual even explains how to enable the Suspend-to-RAM feature in Windows to take full advantage of the board's power saving features.

The software included with the IC7-Max3 isn't much to speak of. You get the requisite driver CD and that's all. Of course, you will want to get the latest drivers from the Abit site anyway since most bundled driver CD's tend to be out of date.

Quite an odd little package accompanied this Abit board; a SecureIDE device by eNova Technologies. This unit is plugged in between the hard drive IDE connector and the IDE cable itself and has a hardware encryption chip built-in to provide data security. A PCI-bracket with a cable on the other end sticks out of the case with a firewire-like connector in which you plug in one of two "keys'. With a key in place the drive can be used like a standard drive but all data is encrypted transparently onto the drive. Without one of these keys, the SecureIDE device will not decrypt the data on the drive. The box claims 0% CPU and memory utilization by the device and full ATA 100/133 support. The encryption method used is 40-bit DES which is rather insecure; this is the same encryption level originally used in SSL until it was found lacking and replaced by 128bit. While a nifty little gadget, its real-world usefulness is up to the user to decide.

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Page 3 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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