Product Bundle

Since all products you may find on the market nowadays provide nearly the same features, capabilities and level of quality and compatibility, more and more hardware manufacturers try to attract attention to their products by offering rich product bundles as well as additional software and/or hardware you may find useful. Probably ASUS and Chaintech offer the most additional capabilities to some of their mainboards, but those are pretty expensive since nothing comes for free in this world. Other mainboard and graphics card makers try to offer a balance between the product price and all the bells and whistles.

ABIT supplies no additional hardware, such as card reader, with IC7 and IC7-G mainboards. That is a thing you need to buy yourself afterwards, though, ABIT’s proprietary Media XP device is not available in many countries because of different reasons, and one of them is its quite high price.

On the CD that comes with ABIT IC7 you will find a set of drivers for Intel chipsets, Realtek Audio, LAN and Silicon Image/Intel RAID controllers; User’s Manual in English, French, German, Japanese and Chinese; Winbond Hardware Doctor software; Acrobat Reader; DirectX 9.0 runtime; Award Flash software for flashing your BIOS in DOS environment as well as FlashMenu 1.10 for flashing BIOS straight from Windows.

Surprisingly, ABIT does not offer to install the FlashMenu utility from its Autorun Menu, so, you will have to find it yourself in Utility\FlashMenu folder.

Additionally, ABIT provides LowLevel Format software with its mainboard. The company has been offering this one for ages, however, I can fearfully imagine how long does it take to perform a low level format for 80 or 120GB HDDs.

Closer Look: Capabilities

ABIT IC7 mainboard does not have a lot of integrated hardware onboard, nevertheless, there are still quite a lot topics to be covered about this mainboard. Hopefully, you have read our previous reviews of i865PE and i875P chipsets, since I will not cover any fundamental technology aspects of Intel’s latest core-logic products and will concentrate on the mainboard itself. First of all, take a look at its picture.

What you see is a nice higher-end mainboard for processors featuring up to 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus with dual-channel PC3200 memory support, but that lacks Serial ATA-150 and Parallel ATA RAID as well as Gigabit Ethernet. This makes such mainboard considerably cheaper, but is still a thing to regret about. Basically speaking, enthusiasts will hardly need IDE RAID at home since they can arrange a Serial ATA-150 RAID massive using Intel’s ICH5R controller. A thing that is considered as useful is definitely a pair of additional Serial ATA-150 ports since in future the world will see not only Serial ATA-150 HDDs, but also DVD-ROMs, DVD-RW and a lot of other optical drives, in that case only two Serial ATA-150 ports may not be enough.