It looks as if the new Intel chipsets equipped with a dual-channel memory controller appeared not so long ago. However, these several months, which have passed since the launch of i865 and i875, appeared not such a short term for the mainboard market. Starting since the middle of April all the leading mainboard manufacturers have already released a few mainboard modifications based on the new chipsets from Intel. Moreover, now we are witnessing the arrival of a new generation of i875 and i865 based mainboards. One of the most vivid representatives of this new product generation is ABIT IC7-MAX3.

There are a few reasons why a new generation of i875 and i865 based mainboards came out. These are not only marketing reasons, but also technological ones. First, let’s figure out what pushed the release the new product generation from the marketing point of view. Since i875/i865 have settled down in the today’s market as excellent solutions for high-performance systems and seem very determined to stay there for a considerable while, the mainboard manufacturers find its hard to keep the customers interested in the same products for a long period of time. Therefore, the competition forces them to invent more new innovations, which could help attract the customers’ attention. The new ideas that get born in the heads of company’s marketing people need to be put into life, which certainly results into numerous announcements of new mainboards based on the i875/i865 chipsets, which are far not that new any more, but are still pretty up to date from the performance and features point of view. So, this is how the second generation of i875/i865 based mainboards comes into this world, boasting a bunch of new interesting and not very interesting features.

From the technological point of view the appearance of numerous Socket478 mainboards is also pretty justified. This can be explained by the upcoming launch of the 90nm Prescott processors. The first CPUs on this new core will use the same Socket478 and 800MHz processor bus. That is exactly why we have every right to say that first Prescott based CPUs will be compatible with i875 and i865 chipsets and with a few mainboards based on them.

However, the mainboards of the previous generation still will experience some compatibility issues with Prescott based CPUs. It suddenly turned out that actual Prescott samples consume a little bit more power and dissipate more heat than it has been initially implied in the requirements list for Prescott-compatible mainboards. To be more exact, instead of the planned 89W of consumed power and 78A of current, the actual values for Prescott notched 103W and 91A respectively. As a result, the mainboards designed by those manufacturers, who didn’t provide their solutions with an appropriate “reserve”, will not be able to work with the new Intel CPUs: to ensure Prescott compatibility they would have to redesign the processor voltage regulator circuit.

These are exactly the reasons that pushed ABIT Company to modify their IC7 mainboard into IC7-MAX3. The new solution boasts a number of very interesting features, which we are going to discuss in detail later in this article, and is absolutely compatible with the upcoming Intel processors on 90nm Prescott core.