However, OTES cooling on ABIT IC7-MAX3 is not only about advantages. There are a few very upsetting drawbacks. Firstly, the 40mm fan rotating at 3,500rpm doesn’t allow calling OTES a silent solution. Unfortunately, if you value quietness, you will be pretty disappointed with OTES, as the humming noise it creates can hardly be disregarded. Secondly, the air output on the rear panel of ABIT IC7-MAX3 occupies the space, which could be used for additional ports, that is why OTES cooling system is the one to blame for the absence of parallel and serial ports on ABIT IC7-MAX3 mainboard. Thirdly, our tests showed that OTES is simply not necessary.

In order to test the efficiency of ABIT’s OTES solution we decided to measure the temperature of the power transistors used in the voltage regulator circuit. To load the system as heavily as possible we used Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz processor and ran different applications squeezing all juices out of the CPU. Well, we got very interesting results. OTES system proved very efficient for processor voltage regulator cooling: it didn’t allow the power transistors temperature to exceed 30-35^oC even when the CPU workload reached its highest peaks. However, it turned out that the four-channel power supply circuit is already efficient enough to reduce the heat dissipation. After we removed the OTES from the PCB, the transistors warmed up to 45-50^oC under the same working conditions. Well, I don’t think you should be concerned about this temperature, it is not too high to cause any stability problems. Of course, the upcoming processors on the Prescott core might be able to push the temperature of the voltage regulator to a much higher level, but I still don’t think that active cooling is so necessary even in this case. In particular, we managed to achieve almost the same cooling efficiency as provided by ABIT OTES by just using OCZ aluminum BGA Ramsinks for the transistors. The temperature in this case also stayed around 35-40^oC. This way, I would consider OTES cooling system of ABIT IC7-MAX3 more a marketing trick, rather than a truly necessary and useful feature.

As for the installation procedure, ABIT IC7-MAX3 proved up to our highest expectations. Despite a great lot of various onboard components, the PCB design is very smart and convenient.

The FDD connector is situated in front of the DIMM slots together with the master connector for the ATX power supply. You will not see the 12V ATX connector at the rear edge of the PCB between the chipset and the AGP slot, just like many mainboard manufacturers usually do. ABIT located it close to the master ATX power supply: to the right of the DIMM slots. The connectors for Parallel ATA hard disk drives have been moved to the left side of the PCB, however, the cables are very unlikely to cause any installation difficulties, because the connectors are parallel to the PCB edge.

I am pleased to state that the AGP graphics card doesn’t block the DIMM slot clips, even if it is a full-size solution. Although ABIT IC7-MAX3 owes this advantage to the 5 PCI slots instead of 6.

Even though the North Bridge of i875P chipset can easily do with a passive cooling solution, ABIT equipped it with a very originally designed fan. Its rotation speed is 2,500rpm, however, it is almost noiseless, unlike the fan of OTES system.

To tell the truth the memory voltage regulator circuitry disappointed me a little. For some reason ABIT IC7-MAX3 uses a linear circuit instead of the pulse one. Although I have to admit that our tests with all four DIMM slots occupied by memory modules didn’t reveal any stability issues even under the heaviest workload.

The major drawback of ABIT IC7-MAX3 PCB design, however, is the encumbered space around the CPU socket. The OTES airway gets pressed to the CPU retention mechanism on the right. As a result, you will hardly be able to use processor coolers with larger trapezoid heatsinks.