Articles: Mainboards

ABIT IC7 Review: An Affordable i875P Based Mainboard (page 7) [07/09/2003 08:24 AM | Mainboards]
by Anton Shilov

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Performance

ABIT offers different performance presets with its i865PE and i875P mainboards, so, I decided to check if these presets actually increase performance and if they do, how much speed they can add.

Configuration of the system I benchmarked is as follows:

Intel Pentium 4 2.40C, 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, HyperThreading;
ABIT IC7 mainboard (i875P);
512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM (2-3-3-5), Corsair XMS3200;
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO graphics card;
Seagate HDD 7200.7, 8MB cache, Serial ATA-150;
Creative Soundblaster Live! 1024 sound card;
Microsoft Windows XP SP1;
ATI CATALYST 3.5 drivers.

ABIT claims that the “F1” preset is the fastest and is intended for hardcore gamers who want to have wicked performance in their games. Well, our testing reveals a bit different picture:

ABIT IC7 Performance Tweaking Capabilities
Intel Pentium 4 2.40C, 512MB DDR SDRAM (2-3-3-5), ATI RADEON 9800 PRO
	Auto	Turbo	Street Racer	F1
Synthetic Benchmarks
SiSoft Sandra 2002, RAM Bandwidth (Int/Float)	4704/4717	4784/4782	4830/4828	4799/4806
PCMark2002, Memory score	8370	8557	9106	8856
PCMark2002, CPU Score	5970	5969	5994	5990
3DMark2001 SE, Default	15335	15530	15777	15836
3DMark03 , Default	5573	5584	5598	5592
3DMark03, CPU Score	567	580	587	580
Gaming Benchmarks
Unreal Tournament 2003, flyby CITADEL, 640x480x32	111.4	113.0	114.3	113.7
Unreal Tournament 2003, flyby CITADEL, 1024x768x32	112.1	113.3	114.7	114.2
Unreal Tournament 2003, botmatch Antalus, 640x480x32	47.5	48.4	48.9	48
Unreal Tournament 2003, botmatch Antalus, 1024x768x32	47.8	47.6	48.2	48.5

Quake III Arena, demo-four, 640x480x32	230.1	233.3	236.5	235.9
Quake III Arena, demo-four, 1024x768x32	226.7	230.2	233.8	232.9

RTCW, Checkpoint, 640x480x32	137.4	139.6	141.2	141.7
RTCW, Checkpoint, 1024x768x32	137.6	139.1	141.3	140.7

Serious Sam TSE, The Grand Cathedral, 640x480x32	102.2	104.8	105.4	105.8
Serious Sam TSE, The Grand Cathedral, 1024x768x32	98.4	102.1	103.1	104

As we all can see now, the fastest performance preset of ABIT IC7 is actually “Street Racer”, not “F1”. Although the latter wins in certain cases, the former clearly holds the performance crown here. I want to emphasize that I did not experience any stability issues with “Street Racer” mode in any cases. The only condition here is that you need to use quality memory modules, as well as quality power supply unit and well-cooled PC case. Otherwise, no one guarantees that everything will work as smoothly, as in my case. Moreover, real-world applications hardly benefit from such tuning of up-to-date Intel Pentium 4-based systems.

Conclusion

We have reviewed a not very expensive mainboard based on i875P chipset designed for high-end desktops and workstations. The mainboard pleased us with great stability and high performance. ABIT’s traditional overclocking and tuning capabilities are available on the IC7 mainboard, as a result, the solution can eventually become popular among overclockers. If you are not going to overclock and just want to have an up-to-date higher-end mainboard, ABIT IC7 is also a good buy, I believe, however, it still has a number of disadvantages you have to keep in mind.

Highs: