Spring is here again and so are new chipsets from Intel. Historically, this company has been introducing its new chipset families in the first half of the year in order to encourage mainboard makers to sell-off all the remaining inventory of older core-logic products as soon as possible so to meet back-to-school season with only new and powerful platforms. There is a number of exceptions from this trend, however, such thing happened in 1997 (with the introduction of Intel 440LX), in 1998 (with the announcement of the legendary Intel 440BX), in 2001 (when the i815-series was launched) and also last year (the i845E/i845G-series arrival). Next Spring Intel will unveil another family of chipsets that will gain popularity by September.

This year Intel introduced its new strategy of chipset announcements: high-end, performance mainstream and mainstream products are announced in a short period of time, but not at once, and appear on the market in mass quantities practically together. This allows Intel to capture a large market share rapidly by offering numerous products each targeting different segments with various requirements. Mainboard makers buy those chipsets from Intel and then position the final products for narrow categories of users and that also expands Intel’s market presence, but makes the process of choosing a mainboard a little bit more complex for end-users.

This year Intel launched i875P (Canterwood) and i865PE (Springdale) chipsets for high-end and performance mainstream segments. In addition, Intel presented i865G for corporate and i865P for mainstream PCs, though, they are not really popular among hardware enthusiasts due to simple reasons and we will talk about them another time. The difference between the i865PE and i875P chipsets lies in PAT and ECC support by the latter, other important features, such as 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, PC3200 dual-channel DDR SDRAM, AGP 8x, Communication Streaming Architecture, Hyper-Threading and Intel Prescott support are available on both platforms. ECC is not a really important feature for most of you, as a result, the only advantage i875P may bring you is Performance Acceleration Technology.

The question a lot of users ask now is whether they should buy a more affordable i865PE-based solution, or still get a high-end i875P-based product. This is a very complex question since relatively low-cost i875P-based mainboards cost the same sums of money as higher-end i865PE mainboards. Therefore, users have to choose whether to get an i875P mainboard without certain capabilities, such as Gigabit Ethernet or additional RAID, or get a feature-rich i865PE product. In the latter case you will not get PAT and will have to sacrifice 2-5% of additional performance, in the former case you may not get certain advanced I/O options. Fortunately, you still may be able to enable a PAT-like technology provided by mainboard maker and get similar performance to i875P, but you will never be able to integrate a Gigabit Ethernet controller chip without buying a relatively expensive PCI add-in card. On the other hand, not all i865PE mainboards allow PAT support and unofficial sources from Intel indicate the company’s intention to disable PAT functionality in i865PE’s hardware once and for all, therefore, there will be no way of enabling PAT on i865PE-based mainboards.

In this article we will discuss an affordable i875P mainboard from ABIT that costs a little bit more than a more or less advanced i865PE-based mainboard from some other mainboard makers. ABIT’s IC7 is a less expensive version of ABIT IC7-G that comes equipped with Gigabit Ethernet and additional Serial ATA-150 RAID controller. It boasts with the same overclocking and tuning capabilities and seems to be a nice solution. So, let’s begin.