Closer Look: Features

Speaking about the features of ABIT IC7-MAX3 I would first of all like to mention that this solution is aimed at the most demanding users, who build their systems with all the latest and fastest Intel processors. That is why this mainboard simply has to support not only the newest Intel CPUs, but also the upcoming ones, and offer a wide range of supported interfaces and protocols for external devices. ABIT IC7-MAX3 meets all these requirements in full.

The list of CPUs supported by this mainboard is not limited by the contemporary Socket478 processors on Willamette and Northwood cores. ABIT guarantees that all the upcoming processor based on Prescott core will also work fine in ABIT IC7-MAX3. To ensure such broad compatibility the mainboard is equipped with a enhanced four-phase CPU voltage regulator supporting higher power consumption rates and hence compatible with Prescott FMB 1.5. By the way, although the official specification for i875P doesn’t promise that it will support Celeron processors, ABIT IC7-MAX3 works just fine with them too. So, I think I can state that the new ABIT mainboard supports all Socket478 CPUs with 400MHz, 533MHz or 800MHz bus with or without Hyper-Threading technology.

Like any other mainboard on i875P chipset or even on i865PE one, ABIT IC7-MAX3 supports up to 4GB of dual-channel DDR SDRAM. If the FSB frequency equals 133MHz, the board supports DDR266 and DDR333 memory, while in case of faster 200MHz FSB the list of supported memory types starts including DDR400 SDRAM as well. There are 4 DIMM slots located in pairs: a pair for each memory channel. If you install memory modules in pairs, you can use dual-channel mode. Since ABIT IC7-MAX3 is based on a more expensive i875P chipset, the board also supports ECC.

Moreover, ABIT IC7-MAX3 definitely supports PAT (Performance Acceleration Technology), which you can actually often see among the features of the i865PE based solutions, too. Even though Intel didn’t imply this technology to be supported by i865PE at all. However, ABIT decided to play safe and didn’t design its high-end mainboard with the less expensive i865PE chipset. They probably were concerned about the rumors that Intel was blocking the possibility to enable PAT in i865 chipset family. However, I haven’t yet come across a single i865PE based mainboard, where it would be impossible to enable PAT :)

As soon as i875 and i865 chipsets came into the mass market, AGP 8x also became a mass standard, which definitely pleased the graphics card makers. Now all mainboards supported AGP 8x. Of course, ABIT IC7-MAX3 supports this graphics interface, too. However, I have to point out that contemporary graphics cards hardly lose any of their speed if they are used in AGP 4x mode. Moreover, AGP 8x interface is very unlikely to last long and will probably become just a transitional solution until the graphics chip developers and graphics card makers move to the promising PCI Express interface. According to the preliminary info, this should happen some time in the middle of next year.