Funny how when building a new rig, I would choose the motherboard I used based on past experience with a brand, included feature set, and cost. That last one is a doozy, I mean, at the heart of my new system lies a piece of equipment that can make or break performance, and I use cost to determine what I will use& I hate to say it, but dollars still come into play when I am building a new rig today.

Lucky for me, and several of you, many manufacturers have been making cost effective high performance motherboards to drive our performance needs and keep a few dollars in our pockets so we can buy that "next" level of cpu. Today I get the opportunity to explore such a motherboard, the ABIT AI7.

The AI7 is the latest i865PE (Springdale) based motherboard from ABIT. Included is ABIT's "µGuru" technology, which adds additional end user reporting functionality and control while running a windows based operating system, unfortunately, nothing here for the nix users.

The AI7 motherboard is so complete, I am starting to wonder what I need PCI slots for (I am currently using none). They even included a Molex to SATA Power converter . Let's go over the specifications.

I have been using ABIT motherboards for some time now, and like many of you, have become very comfortable with their "Softmenu" system, which has continued to develop over the years. By no means am I ABIT biased; my motherboard stable currently contains an ABIT IC7, ABIT NF7, MSI 645 Ultra, ECS K7S5A Pro (can you say cost) and an Asus P3V4x (yes, it is old, but it still rocks). So as you can see, my motherboard tastes are all over the place. If I were to say what motherboard manufacturer I favored, it would have to be one that makes a high quality affordable one&

The ABIT AI7

Installing the AI7, like many new boards that have several rear connectors, was somewhat painful. How was it painful you ask? Well, a couple of cuts / scrapes later I got it installed. The section in particular I am speaking of is the rear I/O plate. There used to be one or two grounding tabs that you had to lift or slide the board under, now there are at least four, some have five or more. The really painful ones are the IEEE-1394 tabs, OUCH.

Well I get past the pain and install the CPU and memory; you might notice at this point that the CPU Socket is angled at 45 degrees from the H/S support. I am not sure if this is to be "unique" or if there is some advantage (trace runs or cooling) to having the CPU positioned this way, unfortunately, it is covered up as soon as you put the H/S Fan on it.

As for the memory, ABIT was nice enough to color code which slots go with which when you are running it in Dual DDR mode, nice touch.

Next I install the add-on cards, which is only the video card at this point. It's nice to be able to install the memory or video card in either order, as with the AI7 setup, neither interferes with each other. Lastly, I connect the SATA / IDE / Floppy cables, everything else is laid out nicely with the exception of the floppy cable. Why would they put that at the bottom of the board?

There are several nice touches that ABIT includes to allow you to get up and running quickly. First off is the "Quick Start" guide, this is a concise three page (per language) manual that goes over the basic setup of your hardware, this would include the USB/IEEE-1394 Headers. Second is a "Jumper Settings" sticker that you can place on the inside of your side panel (unless its clear that is), I have seen this on HP/Compaq servers, and it's a nice point of reference if someone else needs to get into your machine. Might even help those that don't open the case much.

The BIOS

A look at some of the BIOS pages shows what we have all come to expect from ABIT, and a little more. ABIT has included "GAT", aka Game Accelerator Technology, to allow first time overclockers a better comfort level with memory timings, not that even an enthusiast is comfortable with memory timings.

The BIOS is probably one of the top 10 reasons someone would build their own PC instead of buying it off an assembly line. The assembly line ~$400 PC's are fixed; you get what you get, with minimal ability to modify performance.

ABIT uses the Phoenix Award BIOS, which has been their staple since the early days. You can see that the bios screens used on the AI7 are inline with what we are used to seeing from ABIT.

My favorite, Softmenu, has a new added feature called "Instant OC", press the F8 key and the settings you have changed are implemented immediately . Within the "softmenu" submenu, you have the ability to control the CPU speed, North Bridge multiplier, and DRAM Ratio, as well as the voltages and frequency of the AGP/PCI bus.

The CPU voltages allow you to apply up to 1.9V, a little high for my taste, but if you have a good water cooling solution, you could use it and keep the cpu within temps. DDR voltage allows you to 3.0V, a very aggressive setting as most motherboards stop in the 2.8V range.

Going into the "Advanced Chipset" submenu, we find the now familiar "Game Accelerator" section. This allows you to boost performance relative to typical gaming. Under the "Onboard PCI Device" submenu, there was an interesting setting, I enabled and disabled "Enhance Performance" with no change to the NIC throughputs. The manual says that this setting makes the NIC the first priority on the PCI bus. With my setup, this is irrelevant.

Overclocking

I will be a limited here as I only have PC3200 memory, my 1:1 max was at 230 FSB (2.76GHz) and even with relaxed timings and more voltage I couldn't get past 250 FSB (3 GHz). Luckily, that is where many of the top end tests are run at anyway.

The ABIT AI7 overclocked nicely using the standard bios "Softmenu" that we all know and love. I tried using the included Win32 software utility for Overclocking, ABIT OC Guru, with hit and miss results. Sometimes it would properly Overclock the CPU/FSB on the fly applying the appropriate voltages I set etc, and other times it would not take effect. There were times when the motherboard just rebooted as I clicked "apply" on the Utility.

Usually when the motherboard rebooted, it did so with the values that I had applied within the ABIT OC Guru utility. Due to this, and the fact that I am comfortable with the BIOS method, I continued to use the Softmenu for Overclocking.

ABIT has included on the motherboard a digital readout telling you where it is in the boot stage, and supposedly giving you error codes to help interrupt issues. This is akin to MSI's LED's on the back panel, but a little easier to read (as long as you have a see though side panel that is). Of course, the error code that I received when it failed to boot from a try at 260 FSB was not listed in the manual.

Test Setup

Let's take a look at what is inside the test rig for this review:

ABIT AI7 Motherboard
1GB (2x512 in Dual DDR Mode) OCZ PC3200
Intel Pentium 4 2.4c (800MHz FSB)
ATI Radeon 9600xt 128mb
Hitachi Deskstar (IBM Deskstar renamed) 80GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA Drive
Samsung PUMA80 80GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, ATA-100
Windows XP SP1 and Pre-SP2 hotfixes
ATI Catalyst 3.9

All tests are run three times and results are then divided by 3 (unless otherwise noted). VL's testing suite includes the following:

SiSoft Sandra 2004
PiFast 4.3
TMPGEnc (AVI to MPEG2 encoding)
Unreal Tournament 2003
Splinter Cell
DU Meter
Audio Winbench
HD Tach
Business Winstone 2004

I will be comparing the ABIT AI7 to the previously reviewed ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe, a very nice high end Canterwood chipset.

SiSoft Sandra 2004

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 at stock 2.4GHz speeds as well as 3.0GHz overclocked speed.

Sisoft Arithmetic

Sisoft Multimedia

Sisoft Memory

The results are nothing short of shocking, the Springdale chipset is outperforming the Canterwood in almost every category, with the Multimedia benchmark the most drastic of the results.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.3, 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 times are better

This is an interesting chart, the AI7 scores a full 3.5 sec's faster than the P4C800-E at standard clock speeds, once overclocked. However, the ASUS motherboard is over 1 second faster. I would have to contribute the slower overclocked time on the AI7 to my memory timings, they had to be relaxed to get a stable 3.0 GHz clock.

TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding

We will encode a 150mb AVI file to MPEG2 (a somewhat realistic chore as DVD's are MPEG-2). For the AVI to MPEG-2 I used a bitrate of 5000k/Sec, as this is the midrange for a DVD, which is typically between 1000k/Sec to 10,000k/Sec. I used a frame size of 720x480 (DVD Std) and 16:9 NTSC. Note that lower scores are better.

Lower times are better

The ASUS motherboard was outperformed by the AI7 in these tests, not by much, but enough if you do lot of video encoding.

Business Winstone 2004

This is a new test for VL, and from what I could see running, well flying by, as the test's proceeded, appears to be a real world attempt. This benchmark launches MS Office applications creating web pages and moving pictures and text in-between word, excel and power point. Something one might actually do (well, maybe with the exception of Front Page).

At the stock 2.4GHz speed, the AI7 outperforms the P4C800-E, by one point.

Unreal Tournament 2003

UT2K3 s a real system killer and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the [H]ardocp UT2003 Benchmarking utility version 2.1, which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses the dm-inferno map.

The AI7 performed well in UT2003 tests, outperforming the P4C800-E by just over 1% at overclocked speeds, but trailing at stock speeds by just under 2%.

Subsystem Testing

The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed Audio Winbench to test its CPU utilization. CPU utilization was fairly high throughout the DirectSound3D tests. CPU utilization never got to 15%, but it did average in the 8% - 11% range, which is a lot higher than the <2% averages we've seen with the nForce 2. It's not the end of the world, given that the slowest CPU you would ideally be using is a 2.4GHz "C", but we would have liked to have seen lower numbers this late into the Realtek chipsets lifecycle.

This is a synthetic benchmark though, and since I know all of you enjoy a game or two, let's see how the sound will affect UT 2003 performance.

The [H]ardocp Tool has an option to enable and disable sound during testing. Tests will be done with the same hardware configuration as the rest of the benchmarks, except we'll only be displaying the Pentium 4 2.4GHz "C" numbers.

UT 2003, Minimum Detail, 640x480 Resolution

It's plain to see that the CPU takes quite a hit when enabling the onboard sound. Keep in mind though that the settings used are not going to be ideal if eye candy is important to you. Lets see what happens when we setup UT2003 to how a typical gamer would use it.

UT 2003, Maximum Detail, 1280x1024 Resolution

When it comes down to it, at high resolution and detail levels, the onboard sound's CPU utilization will not be a factor at all.

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very enjoyable. I watched some snippets from "Pirates of the Caribbean", listened to a little mix of music (Jazz to Pop to Alternative to Heavy Metal) and found the sound quality to be excellent. Not that coming out of the included onboard S/PDIF jack to my Wireless Acoustic Research Headphones had anything to do with it.

Hard Drive Performance

With the introduction of the more cost effective 7200rpm SATA drives, I snatched up a Hitachi Deskstar with a 8mb buffer (yes, it is the old IBM Deathstar, but supposedly that has been fixed), this should give everyone a better feeling for what performance increase, if any, there is between similar ATA-100 and SATA drives. For this test, we use HD Tach Version 2.61.

PATA

SATA

These results speak for themselves; the SATA drive more than outperforms the ATA-100. At nearly 10,000kps difference and the 7200 RPM SATA drives at close to the same price as ATA-100, I won't be buying any more ATA-100's, you?

Network Performance

We used DU Meter to test the networking speed, and Windows Task Manager for CPU usage. We copied a variety of install files, varying in size of 300kb to as much as 150MB per file from the AI7 machine, to my NF7 box. In between the two I tested with a crossover cable initially and than an Extreme Networks Summit 200-24 (oh the advantage of working for an integrator :p). I used the switch because I wanted to make sure that one of the NIC's was not limiting the other, which it appeared they were. The Extreme Networks Switch has built in buffers, therefore you would be hard pressed to overdrive the 100mb port. Here are the results from both an upload and download (as seen from the AI7) of the same files.

Upload	Download

As you can see, the AI7 appears to be taking a slightly larger hit on the download side, although the throughput was higher. The CPU utilization reached as high as 18% on the close to 10mb/Sec download, and 12% on the 8mb/Sec upload. These numbers are not as bad as a stand alone NIC, but we have to wonder if there is a driver issue here that is getting us a little to close to that 20% mark.

Final Words

ABIT has once again given us a great board to play with without making us take out a loan. With all of the built in features and overclockability, this motherboard is anything but cheap. I enjoyed the layout and attention to detail to things as minute as positioning of the headers and memory slots to reduce interference and allow someone as messy as I am to route cables neatly.

There aren't many problems we see with this board, other than the relatively high CPU usage with the Realtek NIC. Intel's CSA solution would have been a better choice, and provide Gigabit performance to go with it. Though we appreciate the features of the µGuru, the software based ABIT OC Guru isn't the best choice for serious overclockers. Thankfully, ABIT's Softmenu is as solid as ever, and works great in this area.

I was impressed to see this implementation of the Springdale chipset actually outperform the Canterwood based ASUS in the majority of the benchmarks, and the differences where it did not come out on top, where minimal at most. At , this would be a great purchase for the cost effective bargain hunter and enthusiasts alike. I had a Canterwood (an ABIT IC7) in my main rig before swapping it out for the AI7, and after using this board, it's safe to say that the Canterwood is not going back in.

Pros
Great Performance at a reasonable price
Everything is included, but Video, Memory and CPU
Well thought out layout of components and connectors (except floppy)
Great Overclockability

Cons
NIC uses a little more CPU resources than most boards in this class
ABIT OC Guru failed frequently
Those damn grounding pins on the I/O plate (ok, ok, I am getting picky)

Bottom Line: The ABIT AI7 is a good all around motherboard, it would be hard for me to pigeonhole the AI7 as a cost effective solution (it is), or to say it is a great performer (it is) or to even place it as a enthusiasts main board (it could be). The AI7 needs, no, it requires your attention if you are considering a new rig using the Intel P4 line.

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

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