It was a rather unpleasant surprise for one of our readers who was looking for a feature-rich and fast mainboard designed for overclockers and with Prescott support for ultimate future expandability. He found the highly-anticipated ABIT IC7-MAX3 for sale in the USA and was shocked by its price of $279. Even though this is a very interesting product, the price seems to be over all reasonable limits.

PriceWatch search-engine lists a web-store that sells one of the most advanced mainboards around for $279. Even though i875P-based ABIT IC7-MAX3 is expected to support Intel Prescott processors with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, Gigabit Ethernet, 6 Serial ATA-150 ports, special Secure IDE technology and so on, the price seems to be just too high for it. Currently ASUS P4C800-Deluxe with similar general capabilities is quoted at around $175 at PriceWatch.

ABIT did not reveal any recommendations for the price of its IC7-MAX3, but in case the cost of the part will be so high, it will hardly become popular at all...