The Intel 875P/ICH5, aka the Canterwood, was the chipset combo Pentium 4 followers had been waiting for. It not only improved on previous Intel DDR solutions, but its performance meant that enthusiasts no longer had to look at the i850E RDRAM boards as the mecca of P4 performance. With support for advanced features like Hyper-Threading, SATA, AGP8x, Dual Channel memory, and support for 800FSB P4s, the chipset is certainly built with performance and future-proofing in mind.

If there is one knock against the Canterwood, it's the price. Performance doesn't come cheap, and although many will pay for it, not everyone can. The Intel 865 addresses the price issue, though the performance is a little lower than the Intel 875. ABIT did come up with an answer though, and have released a lower priced Canterwood (when compared to their flagship IC7-G Max2 Advance) called the IC7, which is what we'll be reviewing today. It doesn't offer all the hardware features of the more expensive "G", but it does match the performance of its more expensive brother.

The ABIT IC7

ABIT put a lot of thought into the layout of the IC7, and built it with enthusiasts and case modders in mind. To start, the black PCB is very nice, and it'll look great through a case window. There are four fan headers (five if you include the one used by the Northbridge fan), which is the most I've seen on a motherboard in quite some time.

The CPU socket is setup with the socket key facing the back I/O panel, which is a bit different from what I'm used to where it faces the top of the motherboard (or right side if looking at it with the I/O panel facing away from you). With the socket a little further away, and aligned the way it is, this may solve the problem for smaller cases where large heatsinks have problems fitting with a PSU directly above it. Speaking of which, there is plenty of clearance around the socket, so heatsink installs shouldn't be a problem at all.

Moving to the left, we get a look at a sweet looking Northbridge HSF. The fan is quite large, but the noise is negligible. I am quite confident that the cooling will handle serious overclocking, though after popping it off, I'm not too confident with the thermal pad. In my opinion, if you're going to be pushing this board, you should peel off the pad and use a quality thermal compound.

Next up is the AGP Pro 50 slot. I'm not sure how many of you own these cards, but this is something more important for workstation professionals. The slot is keyed though, so it's pretty much impossible to accidentally mess up your video card installation. Curiously missing though is the AGP card retention clip. You also have five PCI slots, which should be more than enough for most users.

Just below the PCI slots are your SATA and IDE connections. You can see the marked areas where the Silicon Image RAID chip and additional SATA connections would normally be on the higher end board. In anycase, you still have two SATA connections, and two regular IDE connections. What I like about the IDE connections is that they are pointed sideways, away from the board, rather than straight up as they normally are. For neat cable freaks like myself, this will make it easier to hide the cables when setting up your drives. It may not seem apparent, but trust me; it is a lot easier this way.

Moving to the right, the power connection is where we like to see it… away from the CPU socket, and at the edge of the motherboard. The floppy connection is right next to it, and it's too bad they didn't align it like they did the IDE cables. Maybe somebody forgot.

The IC7 supports up to 4GB of ram, though that would be an expensive proposition for those of us working in normal jobs. Dual channel support is available by using two sticks of ram in either slot 1+3 or slot 2+4.

The AUX12V connection is one item that I think could have been better placed. There is enough room to fit the power cable in there, but I think a bit more space would make it easier for people with large hands to connect and disconnect the cable.

Your I/O options are quite extensive, including a Firewire connection, and four USB ports. If that isn't enough, you have extra USB and Firewire connections with the included brackets. You'll notice the LAN connection is blocked off, which is no surprise since there is no onboard LAN support.

Speaking about onboard, pictured above, left to right, are the Intel 875P, the ICH5, and the Realtek ALC650. As mentioned, you will not find a LAN physical layer, nor will you find an onboard RAID device.

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.

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).

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

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.

Unreal Tournament 2003

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

No surprises here.

Quake 3 Arena, 640x480

It's getting old, I know, but Quake 3 is still a decent benchmark for almost anything. For motherboards and CPUs, we run at the lowest settings and fire away.

Same trend as we've seen with UT2003.

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480

So far, with the gaming benchmarks, we're seeing that the IC7 is best paired with a Pentium 4 800FSB CPU. Using a 533FSB CPU, the performance does exceed that of the i845PE, but to be honest, you're not going to be getting your money's worth.

3D Mark 2003

We're still up in the air about 3D Mark 2003 here at VL. I'm not a big fan of the summarized scores, but there are a couple of areas of the benchmark I do find useful. Today, we'll be doing the CPU tests.

What you see above is a summary, but it doesn't really tell you anything. Let's take a look at individual tests.

Here we can see that the same trends we've seen with our real-world game benchmarks are mimicked here. The scores are a bit closer in the CPU tests #2, but the same scaling is present.

Subsystem Testing

The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed to test its CPU utilization.

CPU utilization was fairly high though DirectSound3D tests. CPU utilization never got to 10%, but it did average in the 5% - 7% 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 with the IC7 is a 2.4GHz "C", but we would have liked to have seen lower numbers. 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

Here we can see the IC7 loses quite a bit of performance with the onboard sound enabled. Before any of you start getting too alarmed, I seriously doubt many of you prefer to play at such low detail settings. Let's try something more realistic.

UT 2003, Maximum Detail, 1280x1024 Resolution

Here we can see that the sound, on or off, has little effect if you play at a more reasonable resolution. My take on this? Yes, CPU utilization is higher than I would like, but it should not affect gameplay much at all.

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very acceptable, and ever since Scott posted in our forums how much he enjoyed Evanescence - Fallen, I've been listening to that quite a bit as well. The music is a mix of calm and fast paced rock, and the singer's haunting vocals played out quite well through my Logitech THX Z-560's.

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:

If you've read a few ABIT IC7 and IS7 reviews the past few weeks, you'll probably know that the much cheaper Springdale based IS7 has been performing on par with the Canterwood based IS7. Considering the price difference between the two boards, the IS7 appears to be the smarter choice. How can that be, given that the Canterwood has Intel's Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT), but the Springdale does not? The answer can be found in the new "Game Accelerator" BIOS that ABIT released for the IS7 a few weeks ago.

I never did understand why such an optimization would be exclusive to a "mainstream" board, but late last week we got our hands on a BETA BIOS for the IC7 that contains the same optimizations as those found in the IS7.

What is the Game Accelerator?

It's called the Game Accelerator BIOS, but that isn't really accurate. The "Game Accelerator" is actually a feature found in the "Advanced Chipset Features". The rest of the BIOS is essentially unchanged otherwise. from ABIT's site:

"Users have a choice between "Auto", "Turbo", "Street racer" and "F1" so they can optimize their system performance according to their memory modules. The IC7-G will also come equipped with these new settings. With each setting, users can push their overall PC performance further and further. Those who select F1 in the BIOS settings are looking to get Formula 1 performance from their desktop PC, and so should be prepared to unleash raw computing power."

The way the optimizations work is exactly as described above. The Game Accelerator tweaks your memory, and as we already know, tweaked memory improves overall system performance. Basically, you'll want to run your CPU and memory synchronous with each other; i.e., 1:1. Depending on how solid your ram is, either you can the timings before hand, or set it to SPD. Afterwords, you set your ram to one of the four settings, Auto, Turbo, Street Racer or F1. I should point out that Street Racer and F1 may not work on all memory modules. I had a lot of difficulty getting our Corsair TWINX to behave at F1, and it only worked when I relaxed the timings to 2.5-3-3-7, which ended up performing close to 2-3-3-6 at Street Racer settings.

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

SiSoft CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

SiSoft CPU Multimedia Benchmark

There's very little change in the CPU based numbers. The new BIOS targets the memory though, so let's check those out.

SiSoft Memory Benchmark

Here the differences are a lot more dramatic. Typically, faster memory will affect overall system performance, so let's look at some application benchmarks.

PC Mark 2002

CPU scores are close again, but the differences in memory performance illustrate the improvements made by ABIT's engineers.

PiFast

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

Slight improvements in computation times. This reflects a similar trend we've seen with our memory reviews. As memory is tweaked, the time to compute decrease.

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, there isn't a huge difference but a second is a second.

Unreal Tournament 2003

Using the ...

Quake 3 Arena, 640x480

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480

In each case, there's an increase in performance as we switch between memory optimizations. The biggest winners are the Q3 engine games, but UT 2003 shows improvement as well.

3D Mark 2003 - Summary

3D Mark 2003 - CPU Tests

Nothing new here.

As we've seen, the Game Accelerator BIOS made a huge difference, for the better, in our benchmarks. I would imagine any quality sticks of ram can easily handle the Street Racer option, and for F1, you'll need something really good. Even if you don't own performance ram, the system ran fine at Turbo, using a pair of Crucial PC2700 sticks (though I was not able to run them at 400MHz). At Turbo settings, the performance was still better than Auto, so consider this a free performance boost.

CPU performance didn't really change dramatically, there's more to a fast system than dropping in a speedy CPU. Our BIOS was BETA, but the official version is . For you , the Game Accelerator BIOS is also official, and you should pick it up. We'll be presenting our IS7 review before the end of the month, and we'll be using this new BIOS.

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

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