ABIT is renowned for having a BIOS that allows for plenty of tweaking. You have your usual items like Power Management, PC Health Status, and the PnP/PCI Configurations, but 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-MAX3 offers plenty of headway, allowing you to go as high as 412FSB. Now, the reality is you'll be hard pressed getting above 250FSB without some great cooling.

Depending on how high you move up the FSB, the ratio adjustments will come in very handy. For example, if you are using PC3200 ram, and you're looking to move your CPU to 250FSB, you can set the CPU/Memory ratio to 5/4 to keep the ram at 200. Of course the number will vary depending on how high you increase the FSB.

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 1.9v for the CPU, 3.2v for the memory, and 1.65v for the video. The memory voltages are most impressive, though running most of todays memory modules at those voltages may be deadly for the ram.

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.

Here we have the Game Accelerator options. We covered the Game Accelerator before, but in a nutshell, it's a series of memory optimizations. You have a choice between Auto, Turbo, Street Racer and F1. The latter two nets the largest performance gains, but toughest to implement if your ram cannot handle it.

Overclocking

Past ABIT boards were excellent overclockers, so with the new Northbridge cooling, and OTES cooling system, we have some high hopes for the IC7-MAX3.

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

Stock Speed

There's a free ~6MHz OC for you as you can see in the WCPUID screenshot. We can see the CPU is running along at 2405.75MHz, which is slightly ahead of the IC7 tested earlier. Our Corsair TWINX1024-4000 was running at 2-3-3-6, and passed our stability tests at this speed.

The next overclock was 250FSB. We've eased up our timings to 2.5-4-3-6, which was the best we could manage at 1/1. The IC7-MAX3 handled these speeds without any adjustment in vCore. The ram's voltages needed to be increased to 2.7v to handle this speed though.

The stock cooler topped out at about 270FSB. It worked with varying levels of success between 270 - 280FSB, but it wasn't stable. I was worried we'd run into the 250FSB+ again, so we adjusted the CPU/Memory ratio to 5/4. Unfortunently, the problems remained, so it was time to bring in the water.

Using our Swiftech H20-8500, equipped with a couple 68cfm fans blowing trough the radiator, the best OC we managed was 274FSB. I should mention that the system was not stable enough for benchmarks here, despite the ram running at 2.9v. At 272FSB though, the system ran like a champ, all this at 1/1.

290FSB OC

We would have left it at that, but a couple days before wrapping the review up, we got our hands on some Corsair TWINX1024-4000 Pro Series ram. Look for our review shortly, but we managed an impressive 290FSB at 1/1. I wasn't able to run many benchmarks at this speed though, but did grab this screenshot. At 288FSB, 1/1, the system was much happier. One thing to point out, was other than the water cooling, I placed a Delta 68cfm fan on top of the ram. This was needed, as the ram modules were searing at these speeds. I was able to run with stability at 285FSB without any extra cooling.

The last test was the maximum CPU overclock. We reduced the CPU/Memory ratio to 5/4, and managed a maximum overclock of 301FSB. The CPU was hovering in the 62°C - 64°C range at this point. Perhaps when we get our second MCR80 radiator from Swiftech and setup the dual setup I've been planning, we'll have a bit more success here.

Test Setup

ABIT IC7-MAX3: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Ram, ATI AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB SATA Seagate, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.6.

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Ram, ATI AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB SATA Seagate, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.6.

ABIT IC7: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Ram, ATI AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB SATA Seagate, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.6.

Test software will be:

AVI-to-MPG Encoding
Unreal Tournament 2003
Splinter Cell

Now, I mentioned the Game Accelerator BIOS earlier, and I want to make it clear you WILL be seeing benchmarks with the Game Accelerator set to Street Racer. The same goes for the IC7... Street Racer settings as well. The ASUS P4C800-E will be set to "Aggressive", which is about as close to a level playing field to the IC7s as I can make it. Memory timings for the motherboards will be 2-3-3-6 at 200FSB and 2.5-4-3-6 for 250FSB.