Closer Look: PCB Design

A very good thing about almost all new mainboards from ABIT is 4-phase CPU power. This ensures excellent stability as well as increases overclocking potential of the solution. ABIT IC7 is not an exception: the mainboard is a very good overclocker and boasts with astonishing stability.

Unfortunately, PCB design and components layout of ABIT IC7 are not ideal at all. Indeed, there are a lot of drawbacks in them.

The first thing that catches your eye is definitely Parallel ATA ports located horizontally to the mainboard. Firstly, they are placed in such a way that even using rounded cable supplied by ABIT, you will hardly be able to use the highest bays of a big computer case (such as Chieftec Dragon DX-01). Furthermore, since ABIT supplies only one rounded cable with its mainboard, you will have to either use your old convenient ATA cable or get a rounded one somewhere. In the former case they are going to be some major problems with airflows inside your PC case, not talking about need to twist those convenient ATA cable.

Another issue of the same kind is the placement of ATX 12V and FDD connectors. If you still use FDD, its cable will also affect your airflows, moreover, you will have a mess of cables in your PC case if you use two Parallel ATA and one FDD in addition to ATX 12V connector.

On the other hand, all your cables are located in a way they will never affect the work of CPU fan. So, it is really hard to point out whether such layout of IDE, FDD and ATX 12V is good or bad.

We have already noted the problems with location of connectors for additional USB 2.0 and FireWire (IEEE1394) dongles in our ABIT NF7-S review. On ABIT NF7-S mainboard there is some extra space between AGP and PCI slots and those connectors are located there. That time there was a problem with too long cables that could possibly get into graphics card’s fan, this time there is no such problem. But there is another one instead. Since ABIT installed the mentioned headers below the second and the third PCI slots, the cable goes above the PCI and AGP cards, it causes some dramatic difficulties. Firstly, you are not able to plug high PCI cards in the first two PCI slots, secondly, every time you change the graphics card, you have to remove the dongle and then install it once again. Not comfortable at all, isn’t it?

A very serious bad side of ABIT IC7 is active cooling on the i875P Memory Controller Hub. There are a lot of mainboard makers who prefer to use passive heat-sinks for i875P, i865PE and nForce2 North Bridges , but ABIT sticks to active monsters that run at 7000 rpm and compete with the legendary NVIDIA FlowFX cooling-system in terms of making loud noise. In case such inadequate cooling-system is implemented in order to please extreme overclockers, I will have to disappoint ABIT: extreme overclockers will uninstall that small aluminium heat-sink and put something made from copper on the MCH. Fortunately, we can still control the work of the wicked monster from BIOS using ABIT’s FanEQ technology.

Besides, ABIT also did not learn the lesson of placing FPIO2 connector for Media XP device. It is still located on the back-side of the mainboard forcing the Media XP cable to go thorough the whole case which is not good.

Putting aside all the disadvantages of ABIT IC7, it is still a very nice mainboard. You will never have to reinstall your graphics card if you add-in memory modules. Your CPU cooler will never stop because of cables that got into its fins somehow. Finally, you have enough onboard connectors for additionally system fans.