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Abit's IC7-G was
delivered in typical Abit flair, with swank packaging and
lots of add in peripherals to sweeten the deal. Abit also took
the Canterwood layout and dressed it up a bit, fleshing out
many of the innate capabilities of the new Intel ICH5
Southbridge, as well as a few supporting enhancement
components.
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Up
Close and Personal With The Abit IC7-G |
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Canterwood Abit style |
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Click
images for full view
The kit contains
all that you would need to complete a new i875P based
system, with literally all of the various cabling
requirements covered quite well. Abit is appealing to
the enthusiast segment for sure with this bundle, providing
rounded cables for standard ATA100/133 connections, as well
as Serial ATA cables. It was also very refreshing to
see two Serial ATA power cables in this bundle, something we
have yet to see from many motherboard OEMs that are
building SATA capable boards. If that weren't enough,
Abit also includes one of their "Serillel" Serial to
Parallel ATA adapters, should you want to make the jump to
the SATA interface but don't have one of the currently hard
to come by SATA Hard Drives.
Layout wise, the
board is neat and clean and follows very much the same
general landscape of the Intel reference design, with a few
pleasant modifications and enhancements along the way.
Abit has elected to go with "active" cooling on the
i875P Northbridge chip, with a futuristic looking bright
blue fan on top of their heat-sink. However, we aren't
all that confident that this solution provides superior
"heat transfer" from the chip itself. The heat-sink itself is thin and smallish and although the fan
keeps it quite cool, conduction from the chipset core
perhaps isn't as good as the larger, heavier sinks we see on
other motherboards these days. Heat transfer is
as important as heat dissipation or radiation and as such
the smaller metal sink underneath this fan, seems a little
too meager. If Abit were to use a larger sink
underneath this fan, it would be ideal. The rest of
the board is simply top notch design, including a 4 phase
MOSFET power solution, with plenty of large 105C Capacitors,
for stable, clean power.
There are
several other bonus add-on features of this board, including
the addition of the Silicon Image SiL3112 SATA RAID
Controller (underneath the IC7-G sticker), to complement the
SATA RAID capabilities of the Intel Southbridge. This
board offers a total of 4 SATA channels and two PATA
channels. The ICH5 SATA channels support RAID 0
functionality (Intel is rumored to be offering other RAID
modes in future driver releases) and the SI Controller
offers RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 configurations. Abit
also dropped in a Texas Instruments driven FireWire
Controller, for three total available channels, for you
video editing buffs, as well as the Intel Pro 1000CT Gigabit
LAN controller, for full GigE network connectivity.
Sound-wise, Abit's AC '97 6 channel solution, is augmented
with lots of output connections for center and rear
channels, as well as dual SPDIF outputs. Finally,
there are 4 USB 2.0 ports on the back plate and another 4
available off internal motherboard connectors. Abit
also included the back slot connector plate to bring the
additional USB ports out from the motherboard. All in
all, the IC7-G is a really nice offering from Abit, from a
feature-set standpoint.
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Abit IC7-G BIOS Setup |
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SoftMenu - The original |
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Click
images for full view
In our opinion,
the BIOS setup menus are truly, the "soul" of a
motherboard. In this case the Abit IC7-G definitely
has soul. This BIOS is driven by the latest
Award Software BIOS, with standard issue Abit "SoftMenu"
innovations. You can tweak pretty much anything, from
processor, to memory and AGP, to your hearts delight and
with a wide range of voltage controls. You can take
the processor all the way up to 1.9V, DDR DRAM up to 2.8 and
AGP voltage up to 1.7V. Then of course there are the
usual memory divisor and timing settings, with 1:1, 5:4 and
3:2 available as derivatives off the memory bus. These
provide decent flexibility when you are taking bus speeds
well beyond standard spec... and you most likely will, if
you are working with board. Did we mention FSB
selection, in 1MHz increments up to 300MHz? Yes sir,
this BIOS is ready to rock.
Up Close and Personal With The Asus P4C800 Deluxe
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