As with so many past BIOS implementations, ABIT throws everything in here with the IC7. You do have your usual items like Power Management, PC Health Status, and the PnP/PCI Configurations. Let's look at the areas that will be of most interest to our readers.

The ABIT SoftMenu

To access CPU overclocking options, you'll have to set the CPU Operating Speed to "User Defined". Once that's done, you can adjust the Ext. Clock, N/B Strap, DRAM Ratio, AGP Ratio, Fixed AGP/PCI Freq to your heart's content.

Remember that 99% of you only have access to retail Pentium 4 CPUs, so in that case, these CPUs are multiplier locked so you cannot change that. The FSB is another story, and the IC7 offers plenty of headway, allowing you to go as high as 414FSB. Now, the reality is you'll be hard pressed getting above 250FSB without some great cooling.

The AGP Ratio, Fixed AGP/PCI Freq is handy since overclocking the FSB overclocks everything, which can wreak havoc on your system, so it's a good idea to keep those areas within spec.

You got some good voltage options, which is a must when overclocking. The ability to add some extra juice is sometimes the difference between a constantly crashing setup, or a rock solid PC. You can go as high as 1.925v for the CPU, 2.8v for the memory, and 1.65v for the video.

The only other area of note (they are all important, but for those who like to dabble in the art of voiding their warranty…) is the Advanced Chipset Features. It is here you can adjust your memory timings, and if your ram can handle it, you can really tweak it here.

Overclocking

An ABIT board wouldn't be an ABIT without the ability to overclock like a champ. How was the IC7 then? Considering the multiplier is locked, we did quite well. We've had some good luck in the past with the stock Intel cooler, so for the initial tests, we'll be sticking with that.

Out of the box, the 2.4C runs at 12x200.

Stock Speed

Using WCPUID, we can see the CPU is running along at 2405.75MHz. The next OC we went for was 225FSB, which was done without any problems. Stock voltage remained the same, though to run our Corsair TWINX ram at 1:1, we needed to tone the timings down to 2.5-2-2-7.

The next overclock was 250FSB, and in order to do so, we needed to run the ram at 5:4 (200MHz).

250FSB OC

The system booted fine into Windows, but needed a boost to 1.7v vCore to manage stability. Keep in mind we're still using air cooling, so it was about now that I decided it was time to move to water.

290FSB OC

Using our Swiftech H20-8500, equipped with a couple 68cfm fans blowing trough the radiator, the best OC we managed was 290FSB. It'd be a lie to say we were totally stable though, as every few reboots, the system would not get into Windows, forcing a CMOS reset. At 285FSB, things ran much better. I've seen higher OCs from this setup, so there's a possibility that heat may be an issue here (we were at 58C at 285FSB). The radiator is lacking on the H20-8500, and I'm guessing a larger one would allow us ~300FSB OCs.

Test Setup

ABIT IC7 : Pentium 4 2.4C (12x200: 2.4GHz), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, AiW ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.4

ABIT IC7: Pentium 4 2.4B (18x133: 2.4GHz), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, AiW ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.4

Chaintech 9EJS1 Zenith: Pentium 4 2.4B (18x133: 2.4GHz), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, AiW ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1, Intel Application Accelerator v2.3, ATi Catalyst 3.4

Test software will be:

AVI-to-MPG Encoding
CPU Tests
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Jedi Knight 2

Just a quick plug to for hooking us up with the 2.4C used for testing. Bob is a super guy, and tell him VL sent ya and he'll hook you up. Let's get on to testing, shall we?

SiSoftware Sandra 2003

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

Well, it should be obvious by now that the ABIT IC7 is happiest when paired with the right CPU. The right CPU in this case is the 800FSB Pentium 4. The P4 2.4B (533FSB) cuts into the Canterwood's performance, though the performance is still slightly ahead of the Chaintech i845PE solution.

Memory Benchmark

With our TWINX running synchronous at 2-3-3-7, the IC7 in Dual Channel mode shows its superiority over Single Channel. In SC mode, the IC7 suffers quite a drop, so if you're looking into the Canterwood, it'd be a good idea to invest in a couple of matching sticks of ram.

PC Mark 2002

CPU scores are close, though at 800FSB, the IC7 paired with the P4 2.4C leads the pack. The memory scores show a larger difference, though it should be noted that the memory was only running at 266MHz (which is the case with the 9EJS1 as well). What we see between the i845PE and 875P is that the Dual Channel performance still makes a difference, even though it isn't running at full flight.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

Lower is Better

What we can gather here is FSB is king, even if clock speeds are the same. I would imagine most of our readers already know that, but for those who don't, here's the proof. We can also see that the IC7's dual channel memory is helping the 533FSB P4 speed ahead of the single channel i845PE.

TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding

Video editing is a taxing chore, and we'll be testing the IC7 using TMPGEnc 2.512 to encode a 7.78MB, 1:30 movie trailer to a 23FPS MPG file. Note that lower scores are better.

Lower is Better

Much like PiFast, the faster FSB and dual channel memory is what you're going to want if you play around with video editing.