ABIT IC7 Review: An Affordable i875P Based Mainboard

by Anton Shilov
07/09/2003 | 08:24 AM

Spring is here again and so are new chipsets from Intel. Historically, this company has been introducing its new chipset families in the first half of the year in order to encourage mainboard makers to sell-off all the remaining inventory of older core-logic products as soon as possible so to meet back-to-school season with only new and powerful platforms. There is a number of exceptions from this trend, however, such thing happened in 1997 (with the introduction of Intel 440LX), in 1998 (with the announcement of the legendary Intel 440BX), in 2001 (when the i815-series was launched) and also last year (the i845E/i845G-series arrival). Next Spring Intel will unveil another family of chipsets that will gain popularity by September.

This year Intel introduced its new strategy of chipset announcements: high-end, performance mainstream and mainstream products are announced in a short period of time, but not at once, and appear on the market in mass quantities practically together. This allows Intel to capture a large market share rapidly by offering numerous products each targeting different segments with various requirements. Mainboard makers buy those chipsets from Intel and then position the final products for narrow categories of users and that also expands Intel’s market presence, but makes the process of choosing a mainboard a little bit more complex for end-users.

This year Intel launched i875P (Canterwood) and i865PE (Springdale) chipsets for high-end and performance mainstream segments. In addition, Intel presented i865G for corporate and i865P for mainstream PCs, though, they are not really popular among hardware enthusiasts due to simple reasons and we will talk about them another time. The difference between the i865PE and i875P chipsets lies in PAT and ECC support by the latter, other important features, such as 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, PC3200 dual-channel DDR SDRAM, AGP 8x, Communication Streaming Architecture, Hyper-Threading and Intel Prescott support are available on both platforms. ECC is not a really important feature for most of you, as a result, the only advantage i875P may bring you is Performance Acceleration Technology.

The question a lot of users ask now is whether they should buy a more affordable i865PE-based solution, or still get a high-end i875P-based product. This is a very complex question since relatively low-cost i875P-based mainboards cost the same sums of money as higher-end i865PE mainboards. Therefore, users have to choose whether to get an i875P mainboard without certain capabilities, such as Gigabit Ethernet or additional RAID, or get a feature-rich i865PE product. In the latter case you will not get PAT and will have to sacrifice 2-5% of additional performance, in the former case you may not get certain advanced I/O options. Fortunately, you still may be able to enable a PAT-like technology provided by mainboard maker and get similar performance to i875P, but you will never be able to integrate a Gigabit Ethernet controller chip without buying a relatively expensive PCI add-in card. On the other hand, not all i865PE mainboards allow PAT support and unofficial sources from Intel indicate the company’s intention to disable PAT functionality in i865PE’s hardware once and for all, therefore, there will be no way of enabling PAT on i865PE-based mainboards.

In this article we will discuss an affordable i875P mainboard from ABIT that costs a little bit more than a more or less advanced i865PE-based mainboard from some other mainboard makers. ABIT’s IC7 is a less expensive version of ABIT IC7-G that comes equipped with Gigabit Ethernet and additional Serial ATA-150 RAID controller. It boasts with the same overclocking and tuning capabilities and seems to be a nice solution. So, let’s begin.

ABIT IC7: Mainboard Specifications

Every single product, be it a mouse or a monitor, starts from its package. This attracts your attention in a store and this is usually covering with dust somewhere in an utility room. ABIT’s IC7/IC7-G mainboard comes in a stylish frosted black box with blue inscriptions. The package does look like a package of an expensive product for those, who know what they are getting and know for what do they get it. This is actually an example of a package that deserves to be respected.

When you open the box, you do not see a bunch of connectors, manuals, CDs, dongles and so on in plastic bags lying all around the insides, but you notice another two stylish pearly-white boxes.

When you open a box with ABIT label on its side (you will be able to stick this label to you computer case afterwards), you will see a CD with drivers and utilities, a floppy disk with drivers for Silicon Image Serial ATA-150 controller, a sticker describing jumper settings for fastening inside your PC, a User’s Manual and a Quick Installation Guide as well as rear panel bracket. The second box contents include bunch of different useful things like a pair of Serial ATA-150 connectors, two Serial ATA power adapters, a couple of rounded Parallel ATA-33/66/100 cables and a rounded cable for FDD. In addition, ABIT supplies a dongle with two FireWire (IEEE 1394) and two USB connectors. Note that sometimes ABIT supplies a header with one ordinary FireWire and one mini-FireWire connectors.

Take the pearly-white boxes out, pull the remaining covers away and your eyes will see the IC7 mainboard.

Now it’s time to take a closer look at the specifications of ABIT IC7 mainboard.

As you may see, there is no integrated LAN controller and no additional RAID. As I said above, ABIT also offers IC7-G mainboard with integrated CSA Gigabit Ethernet and additional Serial ATA-150 RAID controller. Such mainboard is the top mainboard in ABIT’s family of products with support for processors with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus and the Hyper-Threading technology, which is why it costs quite a lot of money, whereas the IC7 seems to be significantly more affordable.

Product Bundle

Since all products you may find on the market nowadays provide nearly the same features, capabilities and level of quality and compatibility, more and more hardware manufacturers try to attract attention to their products by offering rich product bundles as well as additional software and/or hardware you may find useful. Probably ASUS and Chaintech offer the most additional capabilities to some of their mainboards, but those are pretty expensive since nothing comes for free in this world. Other mainboard and graphics card makers try to offer a balance between the product price and all the bells and whistles.

ABIT supplies no additional hardware, such as card reader, with IC7 and IC7-G mainboards. That is a thing you need to buy yourself afterwards, though, ABIT’s proprietary Media XP device is not available in many countries because of different reasons, and one of them is its quite high price.

On the CD that comes with ABIT IC7 you will find a set of drivers for Intel chipsets, Realtek Audio, LAN and Silicon Image/Intel RAID controllers; User’s Manual in English, French, German, Japanese and Chinese; Winbond Hardware Doctor software; Acrobat Reader; DirectX 9.0 runtime; Award Flash software for flashing your BIOS in DOS environment as well as FlashMenu 1.10 for flashing BIOS straight from Windows.

Surprisingly, ABIT does not offer to install the FlashMenu utility from its Autorun Menu, so, you will have to find it yourself in Utility\FlashMenu folder.

Additionally, ABIT provides LowLevel Format software with its mainboard. The company has been offering this one for ages, however, I can fearfully imagine how long does it take to perform a low level format for 80 or 120GB HDDs.

Closer Look: Capabilities

ABIT IC7 mainboard does not have a lot of integrated hardware onboard, nevertheless, there are still quite a lot topics to be covered about this mainboard. Hopefully, you have read our previous reviews of i865PE and i875P chipsets, since I will not cover any fundamental technology aspects of Intel’s latest core-logic products and will concentrate on the mainboard itself. First of all, take a look at its picture.

What you see is a nice higher-end mainboard for processors featuring up to 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus with dual-channel PC3200 memory support, but that lacks Serial ATA-150 and Parallel ATA RAID as well as Gigabit Ethernet. This makes such mainboard considerably cheaper, but is still a thing to regret about. Basically speaking, enthusiasts will hardly need IDE RAID at home since they can arrange a Serial ATA-150 RAID massive using Intel’s ICH5R controller. A thing that is considered as useful is definitely a pair of additional Serial ATA-150 ports since in future the world will see not only Serial ATA-150 HDDs, but also DVD-ROMs, DVD-RW and a lot of other optical drives, in that case only two Serial ATA-150 ports may not be enough.

A very nice feature of this mainboard is AGP Pro 50 8x availability. Although most of you will hardly ever use a professional graphics card at home, it is definitely better to have a feature rather than not to have it. Note that there is a plastic retention piece located in the AGP Pro 50 slot, remove it before installing an AGP Pro 50-compliant graphics card and never touch it unless you use ordinary graphics card. I believe that I do not need to remind you to use only 1.5 or 0.8V graphics cards with new mainboards. So, if you have one 3.3V graphics card, put it somewhere you will never find it, or give it to those, who will be able to use it.

There is a Winbond W83627HF chip located on the upper left corner of the mainboard. This chip provides self-diagnostic capabilities of ABIT IC7 and allows monitoring a lot of various things, including PSU voltages, CPU and MCH fan speeds as well as processor’s and system’s temperatures. In order to engage the monitoring functions, do not forget to install Winbond Hardware Doctor software supplied on the CD you get with the mainboard.

Following other mainboard makers, ABIT installed FireWire (IEEE1394) controller on its Canterwood-based mainboards. This allows you to set-up networks and use bunch of hardware with FireWire connectors.

Latest trends also require mainboard makers to implement AC’97 integrated audio on mainboards. This is indisputable advantage for those, who do not care about quality of such audio solutions, but desire to have fashionable 5.1 support and optical S/PDIF outputs. Well, ABIT IC7 has everything to offer, thanks to Realtek ALC650 codec. Do not expect this one to provide superior quality audio, though, it should be enough for mainstream 5.1 speakers that do not ensure excellent quality themselves. I want to point out that ALC650 is in fact one of the best integrated audio-solution.

As you see, there are a lot of good to say about ABIT IC7, but the lack of integrated LAN controller and additional Serial ATA-150 ports is a disadvantage. To put the facts straight, you will hardly need more than 2 Serial ATA-150 ports this year, while integrated LAN is a very useful feature, especially on the mainboard with only 5 PCI slots. Since an ordinary 10/100Mb/s Ethernet controller for integration is not expensive at all, I believe that by not integrating any Ethernet support into IC7, ABIT wants to force end-users to buy a more expensive IC7-G with Gigabit Ethernet controller from Intel that will be hardly needed in all its glory simply because not a lot of hardware enthusiasts have Gigabit LANs at home.

Closer Look: PCB Design

A very good thing about almost all new mainboards from ABIT is 4-phase CPU power. This ensures excellent stability as well as increases overclocking potential of the solution. ABIT IC7 is not an exception: the mainboard is a very good overclocker and boasts with astonishing stability.

Unfortunately, PCB design and components layout of ABIT IC7 are not ideal at all. Indeed, there are a lot of drawbacks in them.

The first thing that catches your eye is definitely Parallel ATA ports located horizontally to the mainboard. Firstly, they are placed in such a way that even using rounded cable supplied by ABIT, you will hardly be able to use the highest bays of a big computer case (such as Chieftec Dragon DX-01). Furthermore, since ABIT supplies only one rounded cable with its mainboard, you will have to either use your old convenient ATA cable or get a rounded one somewhere. In the former case they are going to be some major problems with airflows inside your PC case, not talking about need to twist those convenient ATA cable.

Another issue of the same kind is the placement of ATX 12V and FDD connectors. If you still use FDD, its cable will also affect your airflows, moreover, you will have a mess of cables in your PC case if you use two Parallel ATA and one FDD in addition to ATX 12V connector.

On the other hand, all your cables are located in a way they will never affect the work of CPU fan. So, it is really hard to point out whether such layout of IDE, FDD and ATX 12V is good or bad.

We have already noted the problems with location of connectors for additional USB 2.0 and FireWire (IEEE1394) dongles in our ABIT NF7-S review. On ABIT NF7-S mainboard there is some extra space between AGP and PCI slots and those connectors are located there. That time there was a problem with too long cables that could possibly get into graphics card’s fan, this time there is no such problem. But there is another one instead. Since ABIT installed the mentioned headers below the second and the third PCI slots, the cable goes above the PCI and AGP cards, it causes some dramatic difficulties. Firstly, you are not able to plug high PCI cards in the first two PCI slots, secondly, every time you change the graphics card, you have to remove the dongle and then install it once again. Not comfortable at all, isn’t it?

A very serious bad side of ABIT IC7 is active cooling on the i875P Memory Controller Hub. There are a lot of mainboard makers who prefer to use passive heat-sinks for i875P, i865PE and nForce2 North Bridges , but ABIT sticks to active monsters that run at 7000 rpm and compete with the legendary NVIDIA FlowFX cooling-system in terms of making loud noise. In case such inadequate cooling-system is implemented in order to please extreme overclockers, I will have to disappoint ABIT: extreme overclockers will uninstall that small aluminium heat-sink and put something made from copper on the MCH. Fortunately, we can still control the work of the wicked monster from BIOS using ABIT’s FanEQ technology.

Besides, ABIT also did not learn the lesson of placing FPIO2 connector for Media XP device. It is still located on the back-side of the mainboard forcing the Media XP cable to go thorough the whole case which is not good.

Putting aside all the disadvantages of ABIT IC7, it is still a very nice mainboard. You will never have to reinstall your graphics card if you add-in memory modules. Your CPU cooler will never stop because of cables that got into its fins somehow. Finally, you have enough onboard connectors for additionally system fans.

Closer Look: BIOS, Technologies, Overclocking

In the course of two or three years it became trendy to introduce brand-names for certain features and capabilities mainboards can offer us. For instance, ABIT calls functions for overclocking as “SoftMenu”, whereas thermal monitoring solutions is branded as “Thermal Guard”. Such names usually tell nothing to users, who are not familiar with ABIT or other mainboard makers and their product lineup. Moreover, sometimes it is pretty hard to put all the information straight when so many brand-names are used with every single mainboards. Moreover, I sometimes not sure about all those technologies either, given that they all are mixed up in BIOS and that actually makes the choice of mainboard a significantly more difficult task since we are not so sure what exactly we are looking for in terms of capabilities that are masked under certain brand-names. The most complex task is to choose a mainboard from MSI or ASUSTeK: both mainboard makers offer dozens of so-called technologies with their mainboards and those, who do not constantly track new mainboards will hardly be able to understand the meaning and intention of every technology.

Here is the list of technologies found on ABIT IC7 mainboard:

• SoftMenu: overclocking functions, including CPU frequency, PSB frequency. Memory frequency (PSB:MEM dividers), AGP/PCI frequency, memory voltage adjustment, AGP voltage tuning and CPU Vcore adjustment.
• Thermal Guard: system monitoring functions that allow your system to warn you in case one of the fans (CPU fan, MCH fan, system fan) stops. Note, that only one fan can be monitored. Additionally, it may turn the computer off once CPU fan fails to work or CPU temperature is too high.
• Tweak Guard: memory and AGP fine-tuning functions, including CAS latency time, Act to precharge delay, DRAM RAD# to CAS# delay, DRAM RAS# precharge, AGP aperture size and AGP data rate.
• Game Accelerator: to tell you the truth, this technology was added to the mainboard after the release and is basically nothing more than another set of memory fine-tuning capabilities, such as refresh cycle time, read delay (tRD), read relay adjust (tRDA) as well as command per clock (CPC). I decided not to cope with all those fine-tuning methods and used only presets ABIT has to offer, such as “Auto” “Turbo” “StreetRacer” and F1. Furthermore, I want to tell all the hardcore tweakers out there that there is hardly a point of memory fine-tuning on i865PE and i875P platforms since it gives almost no performance boost in real applications.
• FanEQ: a technology that is supposed to control speeds of CPU and MCH fans depending on the temperatures of your processor and i875P chipset (remember that NB fan is extremely loud on IC7). At this point it only controls MCH fan speed. I would recommend you to set the speed of NB fan at 70% and activate the full speed when the temperature exceeds 55 degrees Celsius. This ensures total stability and still maintains pretty quiet operation.

Traditionally, ABIT’s mainboards are renowned for excellent overclocking and tweaking capabilities. The IC7 is not an exception here and also offers great set of functions for power users.

Unfortunately, Intel’s ICH5R controller has a very interesting peculiarity: system with Serial ATA-150 hard disk drive will not boot in case PCI frequency is not 33MHz. According to various reports, other Serial ATA-150 controllers allow PCI overclocking, so, ABIT IC7-G with a third-party Serial ATA-150 RAID controller is more preferable for overlockers than ABIT IC7.

Due to the “feature” mentioned above, I was not able to overclock Quad Pumped Bus beyond 1066MHz. The processors I used was the same Intel Pentium 4 2.40C we used in our article “Intel Pentium 4 2.40C Overclocking”. Since overclocking results between the article and current experience are comparable, I do not think we should publish them at this point.

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:

• High stability;
• Excellent overclocking and tuning options;
• AGP Pro 50 support;
• USB 2.0 and IEEE1394 support;
• Integrated 6-channel audio;
• Serial ATA-150 RAID support;
• Relatively low cost;
• Stylish package.

Lows:

• PCB layout has a lot of drawbacks;
• Extremely loud active MCH cooling system;
• Only 5 PCI slots;
• No integrated Ethernet controller at all;
• Only two Serial ATA-150 ports;
• AC’97 audio-solution, a PCI solution would definitely be a bit better;
• Not rich product bundle.