Hard Drive Performance

I apologize for not having any SATA drives to properly test the SATA performance, but I will be using a Parallel-to-SATA adapter to at least give it a shot.

SATA Performance (with Parallel-to-SATA adapter)

ATA Performance (Regular IDE)

From what I can tell you, unless you have a SATA drive, you're probably better off just using a standard IDE connection. CPU usage is quite a bit lower, though so is the average read speed. Random Access Times are within our margin of error, but this is more a hard drive architecture measure.

Overclocking Results @ 3GHz

We weren't going to leave you guys hanging without any overclocking results, so with out 2.4C running at a healthy 3GHz (250FSB), at stock voltage and stock cooling, these results should be attainable by almost everyone. Hardware settings are identical to the previous benchmarks in this review.

CPU	MMX	Memory

Our SiSoft Sandra numbers were pretty impressive, but it was the real-world benchmarks that are eye openers.

TMPGEnc - Stock: 27 sec, OC: 22 sec

PiFast - Stock: 57.52 sec, OC: 47.3 sec

UT2003 - Stock: 271.06 fps, OC: 328.88 fps

Q3 - Stock: 285.5 fps, OC: 355.2 fps

JK2 - Stock: 174.5 fps, OC: 209.0 fps

Those are some serious numbers there, and keep in mind this was done with stock cooling. The IC7 was rock solid during the tests, and after a couple weeks, it's still running strong.

Final Words

Moral to the story? It's obvious overclocking will net some serious performance gains. What's great is that the IC7 and Pentium 4 2.4C handles it so well, and realistically, a 250FSB should be a slam dunk. Still, overclocking isn't everyone's bag (and why is that?), and even at stock speeds, we got some of the best performance we've seen out of an Intel platform around here at VL.

The ABIT IC7 doesn't have what I would call a feature-rich package. There's no hardware based RAID, and no Gigabit ethernet, let alone any ethernet. It's been awhile I've had to use a PCI based NIC, and I certainly don't miss the 30% CPU utilization of this 3Com 10/100 card. On the otherhand, if you wanted all the frills, pickup an ABIT IC7-G Max2 Advance, but get ready to shell out a couple C-Notes for that. Though it's missing a few hardware based features, it does offer quality sound, albeit with high CPU utilization. Other enhancements such as Hyper-Threading, 800FSB support, and Dual Channel DDR... it's all here.

We've already discussed the speed and overclocking, but how about stability? Like past ABIT boards we've worked with, this was a non-factor as the IC7 proved to be very tough to lockup. Even when we did push too far, a simple CMOS reset fixed things. What I did like was resetting the CMOS didn't mess with the system clock, though I did have to reset other areas.

Speaking of which, the BIOS, specifically the Softmenu, was a breeze to work with. I would have liked to have seen higher voltage options for DDR, you do get a fair amount of options to work with when overclocking. I do have some news though. ABIT has released a new BIOS, dubbed the Game Accelerator (actually, that's the name of the option in Advanced Chipset Features), that greatly improves performance. I got the BIOS update a little too late to include in this review, but I did run a few tests and I am quite impressed as I saw performance gains from 5% to 25% across our benchmarks. I'll be posting a follow up this week, so stay tuned.

Ed. Note: You can read about the latest changes and improvements regarding the Game Accelerator right here.

Pros: Excellent performance, overclocking and stability. Low price for a Canterwood.

Cons: Sound eats into the CPU, no ethernet (hence the lower price).

Bottom Line: If you're planning on a P4 setup, a Canterwood is the way to go. It's still a bit pricey, but the ABIT IC7 is one of the lower priced boards available. If you can live with an add-on NIC, you should give this board serious consideration.

If you got any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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