A very nice feature of this mainboard is AGP Pro 50 8x availability. Although most of you will hardly ever use a professional graphics card at home, it is definitely better to have a feature rather than not to have it. Note that there is a plastic retention piece located in the AGP Pro 50 slot, remove it before installing an AGP Pro 50-compliant graphics card and never touch it unless you use ordinary graphics card. I believe that I do not need to remind you to use only 1.5 or 0.8V graphics cards with new mainboards. So, if you have one 3.3V graphics card, put it somewhere you will never find it, or give it to those, who will be able to use it.

There is a Winbond W83627HF chip located on the upper left corner of the mainboard. This chip provides self-diagnostic capabilities of ABIT IC7 and allows monitoring a lot of various things, including PSU voltages, CPU and MCH fan speeds as well as processor’s and system’s temperatures. In order to engage the monitoring functions, do not forget to install Winbond Hardware Doctor software supplied on the CD you get with the mainboard.

Following other mainboard makers, ABIT installed FireWire (IEEE1394) controller on its Canterwood-based mainboards. This allows you to set-up networks and use bunch of hardware with FireWire connectors.

Latest trends also require mainboard makers to implement AC’97 integrated audio on mainboards. This is indisputable advantage for those, who do not care about quality of such audio solutions, but desire to have fashionable 5.1 support and optical S/PDIF outputs. Well, ABIT IC7 has everything to offer, thanks to Realtek ALC650 codec. Do not expect this one to provide superior quality audio, though, it should be enough for mainstream 5.1 speakers that do not ensure excellent quality themselves. I want to point out that ALC650 is in fact one of the best integrated audio-solution.

As you see, there are a lot of good to say about ABIT IC7, but the lack of integrated LAN controller and additional Serial ATA-150 ports is a disadvantage. To put the facts straight, you will hardly need more than 2 Serial ATA-150 ports this year, while integrated LAN is a very useful feature, especially on the mainboard with only 5 PCI slots. Since an ordinary 10/100Mb/s Ethernet controller for integration is not expensive at all, I believe that by not integrating any Ethernet support into IC7, ABIT wants to force end-users to buy a more expensive IC7-G with Gigabit Ethernet controller from Intel that will be hardly needed in all its glory simply because not a lot of hardware enthusiasts have Gigabit LANs at home.