The ABIT IC7 we've previously reviewed proved to be very speedy and stable. The only drawback was the missing features found on the high-end IC7-G, as well as some issues running at a 1:1 CPU and Memory ratio (resolved with a later BIOS update) over 250 FSB.

Going back to the drawing board, ABIT made some drastic changes to the IC7 by adding their patented OTES cooling technology, Secure IDE, fixing the 250+ FSB 1:1 memory issue, as well as other optimizations now that the 82875P has matured. Today, we'll be reviewing ABIT's newest flagship, the IC7-MAX3.

Naturally, 800FSB CPUs, AGP8x, Dual Channel DDR and (Intel's Communication Streaming Architecture) CSA are all supported thanks to the 875P MCH. Designed for enthusiasts, the Northbridge is kept cool with a very nice orb heatsink.

The ICH5R Southbridge takes care of business by supporting USB 2.0, SATA (RAID supported), six-channel audio, as well as legacy ATA100 and 10/100 Ethernet. The 875P also supports Hyper-Threading, so those of you with HT apps and compatible OS will get a bit of a performance boost.

Although the board natively supports Intel RAID Technology, ABIT included a Silicon Image SATA controller for additional IDE and RAID support. There is also an Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller, which isn't a standard now, but if you got the wiring and appropriate routers, you'll have the fastest Intranet on the block. For sound, the robust Realtek ALC650 makes another appearance here.

All the features thus far were found on ABIT's previous IC7 boards, so what makes the IC7-MAX3 so special? Well, it's no secret that the hot spot on any motherboard is the CPU area. The CPU generates a lot of heat, as does the Northbridge, and the surrounding mosfets and capacitors.

You already have cooling for the CPU, and a heatsink/fan covers the MCH, so to address the other heat sources, ABIT implemented their OTES cooling technology to take care of that.

What is nice about this is that no case mods will be required to install this board, though you'll need to use the modified back plate, which is included. In practice, there is a fair amount of heat vented out the back of the case through the OTES fan, and I shudder to think how much heat was trapped there before.

The ABIT IC7-MAX3

Lately, ABIT has made some nice changes to their packaging where smaller boxes contain the manuals, drivers, cabling, and other accessories. This packaging will keep things organized for one thing, as well as preventing these accessories from bouncing around during shipping.

There is a special back plate supplied for the IC7-MAX3 to accommodate the newly designed back I/O panel of the motherboard, and the OTES cooling. ABIT also tossed in a round IDE and floppy cable, as well as four SATA cables. No regular IDE ribbon cables are provided, though this may not be an issue with some of you. Personally, I'm not a big fan of round cables, but my opinion may be in the minority.

The Secure IDE allows you to encrypt your hard drive with a physical key. The encryption level is 40 bit, which should be more than enough for the home user. You need to attach this between your hard drive and IDE connection to use it. It's a shame that SATA users are out of luck here, as I would have liked to make use of this device.

Removing the packing boxes reveals the ABIT IC7-MAX3. The layout is similar to that of the IC7, but it's worthwhile to go over a few key areas. Looking at the socket area, you'll see the OTES cooling setup covering all the primary mosfets and capacitors.

Although most heatsinks should be fine, there will be some inconvenience with the standard Intel cooler. As you can see above, the space is a bit tight where the clip connects to the socket. Although installing the heatsink wasn't difficult, I had a bit of trouble removing it. I only have a few Intel coolers (Swiftech MCX4000, Vantec Aeroflow and a CopperX), and they all fit. It's just tight.

Along with the AGP8x, you have five PCI slots for your expansion needs. Considering the quality of the onboard peripherals, I think this should be more than enough slots for the majority of users.

Thinking of putting together a server or high-end workstation? With six SATA connections, four from the Silicon Image controller, and two standard IDE connections, your storage options are pretty impressive.

Rounding things off are the ram slots and the back I/O panel. In order to enable Dual Channel mode, you'll have to install the ram in pairs in slots 1+3 or 2+4. Other than the fan for the OTES system, you have four USB, surround sound, the NIC and PS/2 connections.

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.

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.

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.

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

Performance is pretty close between the three Canterwood boards, with the IC7-MAX3 taking the speed crown. The overclocked numbers are especially impressive though, cracking the 20 000 mark in MMX Floating Point operations.

Memory Benchmark

Some nice numbers again with the overclocked IC7-MAX3. You can refer to our last IC7 review, but it is in your best interest to run in Dual Channel mode to get the most performance out of your rig. What was surprising here was the ASUS board did pretty well against the Game Accelerator boards.

PC Mark 2002

The same trends here with PC Mark as they were with SiSoft. At the overclocked 250FSB settings, the Game Accelerator makes a far larger impact this time around. as the IC7-MAX3's lead is much more evident, but these are only synthetic benchmarks. Let's move on to real-world benchmarks.

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

At 2.4GHz, both IC7 boards lead the way, with the IC7-MAX3 holding a slight edge. Credit to ABIT's superior memory timing options.

TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding

Video editing is a taxing chore, and we'll be testing the IC7-MAX3 using TMPGEnc 2.512 to encode a 7.78MB, 1:30 movie trailer to a 24FPS MPG file. Note that lower scores are better.

Lower is Better

Dead even between the boards, though this is likely more the result of us using a small MPG file. We'll be looking into updating this test in the near future.

Unreal Tournament 2003 @ 640

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.

The IC7 boards simply blow the P4C800 away here, and the IC7-MAX3 manages a small 2 frame per second lead over the IC7. Again, the Game Accelerator seems to be the deciding factor here.

Splinter Cell @ 640

New to our test bench is UbiSoft's 3rd person action game, Splinter Cell. We used the Beyond3D demo, and ran the demo at 640x480 at the lowest detail levels.

A bit closer in Splinter Cell than it was with UT2003, but the ASUS board trails nonetheless by a couple frames per second.

Subsystem Testing

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

Like the IC7's Realtek solution, CPU utilization was fairly high thoughout the DirectSound3D tests. CPU utilization never got to 11%, but it did average in the 5% - 8% 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-MAX3 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

With sound enabled, the IC7-MAX3 takes a nasty 20 frames per second hit. This is, on average, the results we get whenever we test the onboard Realtek, but I doubt most of you play at these settings, so let's look at something more realistic.

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. I for one won't be able to spot a 0.0019 difference, so if you're going to game with the onboard sound, you should be fine.

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very acceptable, as was the case with movie and MP3 playback. I ddin't hear any distortion, even when moving files around the hard disk. For recording tests, I used a small microphone that came with my Audigy Platinum, and recorded a few samples while running a disk defrag. The recordings sounded as they should, with no crackling or distortion. I don't exactly have a sound studio setup, but it seemed to work fine to the best of my knowledge.

Hard Drive Performance

The maximum read speed with the Seagate SATA drive was about 55MB/sec, with 44MB/sec being the average. CPU usage was low at 2.8%, which is in line with other Intel based SATA interfaces I've tested.

Network Performance

We used to test the networking speed, and Windows Task Manager for CPU usage. We copied a variety of install files, totalling 752 MB, varying in sizes of 300kb to as much as 450MB per file from the IC7-MAX3 machine, to our IS7 box, which uses a 3Com based Gigabit Ethernet controller. Both systems were connected via a Cat-5E crossover cable, which should prevent any bottlenecks that would arise with our standard 10/100 router.

Download speeds averaged about 27.23MB/sec, and CPU utilization averaged about 26%, with 22% being the low mark.

Uploading the same files averaged about 45.27MB/sec, and CPU utilization averaged about 28%, with 23% being the low mark.

These numbers are in a best case scenario, using Gigabit networking. A quick test of an FTP upload and download of 30 MB resulted with an average of 70kb/sec up and 400kB/sec. This was through a 10/100 router and 10/100 cable modem.

Final Words

For Pentium 4 fans, you'll be hard pressed to find a better board than the IC7-MAX3. Of the three Canterwoods tested today, the IC7-MAX3 finished on top of every benchmark thrown at it. Stability was excellent, especially when running at 1/1 at 250FSB and up.

The IC7-MAX3 was built with the overclocker in mind. The Soft Menu BIOS was pleasant to work with, offering more than enough options for the die hard enthusiast. Maybe a 1.925 - 1.95 option for CPU voltage would have been nice, but 1.9v should be enough for most of us. The Game Accelerator lives up to it's name and really showed it's worth in our UT2003 tests.

The OTES cooling system did it's job well. The PCB is noticably cooler on the back of the motherboard, and feeling the amount of heat being vented out the back of the system, it was obvious that the OTES is not just there for looks. Although overclocking went better with the IC7-MAX3 than it did with the IC7, I can't say for sure if the cooler capacitors and mosfets are the reason so. I will say is that very heat that the OTES is wicking away is the same heat normally trapped in the chassis, so the motherboard cooling is something you'll likely not have to worry about.

At and , ABIT does cover other price segments of the Canterwood crown, so if you don't need all the broohaha, the latter boards offer similar performance. Ringing in at just over , this is a lot of money to spend on a motherboard. There are a couple of competing boards that do cost more, and these boards offer some nice eye-candy like glowing PCBs, and FrontX panels. Personally, I prefer functionality more, and the IC7-MAX3's OTES is well worth the cost. Add the six SATA connections, and Gigabit LAN, and you'll see you're getting your money's worth.

Pros: Excellent performance, overclocking and stability. OTES cooling technology.

Cons: Sound eats into the CPU, expensive.

Bottom Line: For those of you who already own Canterwood boards, is this upgrade necessary? Well, if you squint hard at our benchmarks, the answer is probably no. If you got the cash, I'd say hell yeah. There is some serious performance, waiting to be untapped, and with the stability of the board, you'll be hard pressed to find something better.

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

HOME