And in conclusion to our features coverage I would like to tell you about the most exciting tidbit of ABIT IC7-MAX3. The most remarkable feature of this product is the possibility to connect a lot of SerialATA hard disk drives. The mainboard is equipped with the total of 6 SerialATA-150 ports.

Two of them are implemented in the ICH5R South Bridge, and you can also arrange RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays there. Other four ports can be connected to the integrated PCI SerialATA controller from Silicon Image – SiL3114. Note that Silicon Image Sil3114 is not a hardware RAID controller, however, you can still build RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 arrays of the drives connected to it. This feature is implemented on the software level with the help of special SATARaid programs. If your system features a fast contemporary CPU, the performance of this solution will not be any slower than that of the classical RAID controllers (see our Dual-Channel SerialATA RAID Controllers Roundup for details). Moreover, even though you can connect up to six HDDs to ABIT IC7-MAX3 mainboard, there are only two standard ATA/100 channels implemented in the chipset South Bridge. I was greatly surprised that ABIT didn’t supply its Serillel adapters together with the board, which could allow connecting regular ATA-100/133 drives to the numerous SerialATA ports.

One more drawback of ABIT IC7-MAX3, which I would like to mention is the absence of any diagnostic tools onboard. If I am not mistaken, ABIT used to equip some of the products with a POST controller. Unfortunately, this initiative didn’t take root.

Secure IDE

ABIT IC7-MAX3 mainboard is also supplied with a very interesting additional controller aka Secure IDE. This controller is a daughter card, which can be installed between the HDD and the mainboard. The major function of this Secure IDE controller is to encode the data going through it. Secure IDE works in real time and is compatible with Parallel ATA interface. Due to the eNOVA X-Wall LX-40 chip, Secure IDE uses a well-known DES algorithm with a 40bit cipher key for data encoding. Some of you may think that a 40bit long key is still not enough for reliable data encoding, because this code can be easily “cracked”. However, if you are that skeptical, you should also keep in mind that breaking a code created with a 40bit key will require enormous resources, so that the game will be worth the effort only if you store some State secrets on you hard drive.