ABIT is expected to announce its mighty IC7-MAX this Friday and claims it will be the mainboard of the whole Summer 2003. The product is aimed to deliver you quite some features in addition to those provided by the IC7 and IC7-G, but probably the main advantage of the IC7-MAX is guaranteed support for Intel Prescott processors, Intel’s next hot chip code-named Prescott.

The IC7-MAX motto is quite simple and easy to understand: MAXimum Cooling, Performance, Storage, Service, Security, Overclocking, Multimedia and Engineering. It means that the company made a powerful and exciting product by incorporating there every latest innovation, bringing experience of using a mainboard to the maximum.

The specifications of the mainboard are quite obvious, though, hardware freaks and maniacs should have an opportunity to read them combined:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4/Prescott/Celeron processors with 400/533/800MHz Quad Pumped Bus with up to 3.60GHz clock-speed and above;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• 4-Phase CPU Power. Capacitors and MOSFETs are cooled by special OTES cooling system.
• i875P chipset, including Canterwood MCH and ICH5R I/O controller;
• 4 DIMM slots for up to 4GB of PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory. Dual-channel memory bus support: the memory modules should be identical and installed in pairs;
• 5 PCI slots and 1 AGP Pro 8x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller;
• ICH5R supports 2 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID.
• Silicon Image additional controller supports 4 Serial ATA-150 ports;
• Up to 8 USB 2.0 ports;
• 3 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports;
• 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Intel via CSA bus;
• 6-channel audio solution;
• Lots of additional tuning functions, including technologies found on all present mainboards from ABIT (read our ABIT IC7 Review for more details);
• ATX Form Factor.

Besides, ABIT plans to implement its Secure IDE technology for the first time ever in its mainboard. Secure IDE is an encryption card that uses the eNOVA X-Wall chipset that ensures confidentiality and privacy data through disk encryption. According to ABIT, Secure IDE will allow end-users to deny the access to the HDD in certain cases, providing some more security.

The pricing of the solution is to be unveiled and may vary depending on the region. But for those, who plan to acquire a high-end Intel Pentium 4 mainboard, it definitely worth waiting a week or two for ABIT to actually launch its IC7-MAX3, since the company claims it was designed with Prescott FMB 1.5 specifications in mind, hence, will provide the opportunity to install the new chip on the existing platform.