With the release of the Pentium 4 "C" 800FSB CPUs, there was also the release of the Intel 875P. As we've seen here at VL, the ticket to top Pentium 4 performance comes with the Canterwood, but a quick look around though, and you'll see that this performance comes at a price. Some people are willing to splurge on it, whereas others are a little more hesitant.

Shortly after, the more mainstream oriented i865PE chipset was released, codenamed Springdale. The Springdale offers almost every feature the Canterwood does, at a much lower cost. Could this be the P4 based mainboard to buy? We'll try to help you decide with our look at the ABIT IS7 Max II Advance.

Our box arrived a little banged up (good job UPS), but otherwise, everything came intact. Blue, black and white are the colours of the day, with everything neatly packed inside.

Other than the motherboard, ABIT throws in a replacement IO back panel, IDE and floppy cables, a couple SATA cables, power connections, driver CD, a manual, and a reference sticker with the mobo layout on it. What's nice about this sticker is you can just place it on the interior of the case, and you no longer have to rummage through your manual to figure out how to connect your case cabling.

The ABIT IS7 Max II Advance

Targeted at the mainstream user, you'd think that i865PE motherboards wouldn't appeal to the enthusiast. A quick look at the the i865PE, and initially we'd say that there isn't anything special about it, but upon closer examination of the ABIT IS7, and you'll realize that ABIT designed this board for the power user. Unlike the IC7, ABIT reverted back to the orange PCB we're used to seeing on their boards. There are five three-pin fan headers (one which is used by the Northbridge fan), which should be more than enough for the majority of users.

The CPU socket is setup in a more traditional manner that we're used to seeing on Pentium 4 boards, with the key facing to the right (as pictured) of the motherboard. There's nothing noteworthy about the alignment, other than it may be a little to close to the edge. There's enough clearance for most heatsinks, and the capacitors don't get in the way when installing the retail heatsink clips. As with past ABIT boards, Rubycon capacitors are used here, and they are of high quality.

Moving to the left, we get a look at a sweet looking Northbridge HSF, which is the same one used on the IC7. There are clamps used to hold the heatsink down, which makes swapping it, or reapplying thermal paste, an easy task since you won't need to remove the motherboard as you would if there were push pins. ABIT used a thermal pad, but we recommend removing it and applying some quality thermal paste.

Next up is the AGP slot, which also has the AGP card retention clip we're normally used to seeing. One design issue I see is that the AGP slot is lined up with the edge of the ram slots. You will most likely have to remove your AGP card when removing/reinstalling your ram in DIMM1 (and possibly DIMM2). A minor nuisance, but I just call it like I see it. In practice, it is possible to jimmy the ram out with an AGP card installed, which I have done, but it isn't easy.

You also have five PCI slots, which should be more than enough for most users. There is a fair amount of space between the AGP slot and PCI#1, which means that unless you use an aftermarket VGA cooler that is excessively huge, you will not lose PCI#1 as you normally would. Again, ABIT is thinking about the enthusiast.

Just below the PCI slots are your SATA and IDE connections. Like the IC7, the IDE connections are aligned at the edge of the motherboard, facing away. Personally, I like this alignment, as it makes hiding IDE cables easier, but it is certainly not as easy to work with if your hard drives cover the connections. For the SATA connections, two are controlled by the ICH5R, and the Silicon Image SATA controller controls the other two.

Moving to the right, the power connection is located near the edge of the motherboard, just above the floppy connection. The location is good, as it is far away from the CPU socket. It is possible that your power cable may drape across your ram if you're the type who just plugs things in without routing it neatly.

Speaking of which, the IS7 supports up to 4GB of ram. Dual Channel support is available by using two sticks of ram in either slot 1+3 or slot 2+4. Feel free to read our Corsair TWINX review if you're wondering what Dual Channel is all about. Keep in mind the notes made earlier regarding AGP card and ram access.

One issue I have is the location of the CMOS reset. What is good is you don't have any capacitors grouped around the jumper, which makes it a simple affair to grab on to it. However, the location puts it int he vicinity of CDROM drives in standard ATX cases. Add the IDE cables and power connections, and if you have more than one CDROM drive, you can imagine it's a bit of an inconvenience to get to it.

Although the primary power is kept away from the CPU socket, the 12v AUX connection is not. Normally, I'd mention how this is an inconvenient location, but the 12v connection does supply the extra power to the CPU, and the shorter distance will keep the Pentium 4 itself happy.

For the rear panel I/O, I think there will be plenty here that should make people happy. You have your PS/2 ports, serial and parallel ports, S/PDIF and five audio ports, four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire connection, and a Gigabit LAN connection.

The last items worth pointing out are the onboard peripherals. Above, left to right, is the Intel 865PE, the ICH5R, the Realtek ALC650, and a 3Com Gigabit NIC. I've never used the 3COM Gigabit NIC before, so it'll be interesting to see how it performs. I'm not too wild about the Realtek solution though. Sound quality has always been good, but CPU utilization has also always been higher than others.

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 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.

One item you may not see, unless you've updated the IS7 to the latest BIOS (or if you've purchased a recent revision), is the Game Accelerator options. It is possible that boards you buy as of today may already have it, but the BIOS is official, and ready for download now. We covered the Game Accelerator just over a week ago, 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.

We've covered the importance of the Game Accelerator recently, and let me just say it is very much worth your while to download it and update your board.

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.

I should mention that early in our IC7 tests, a bump to 1.7v was needed for the CPU, but this was not required after a couple weeks. Out of the gates, the IS7 handled the 250FSB with no adjustment in vCore. This goes to show you that occasionally, your CPU needs to be burned in.

The stock cooler topped out at about 258FSB. It worked with varying levels of success between 255 - 270FSB, but it wasn't stable. It was time to bring in the water.

301FSB OC

Using our Swiftech H20-8500, equipped with a couple 68cfm fans blowing trough the radiator, the best OC we managed was 301FSB. I should mention that the system was not stable enough for benchmarks here. I managed to take a screenshot, and save it, but a few minutes later, the system locked up. The temperature was about 58C in the BIOS, so I don't know if heat was an issue, so this may be the breaking point for the CPU or the IS7. At 290FSB, things ran much better, but after about 30 minutes, the system would lock up again. It's no secret that the Swiftech H20-8500's radiator is a bit on the small side, so a larger radiator may make the difference between getting to 300FSB, and running at 300FSB.

Test Setup

ABIT IS7 Max II Advance: 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 IS7 Max II Advance: Pentium 4 2.4C @ 3GHz (12x250), 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 2.4C (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

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. I will also be presenting pre-Game Accelerator benchmarks for both motherboards to illustrate the improvements a simple BIOS update can make. The key will be as follows:

IS7 - Pre = IS7 @ 2.4GHz with no Game Accelerator
IS7 - SR = IS7 @ 2.4GHz with Game Accelerator @ Street Racer
IS7 @ 3GHz = IS7 @ 3GHz OC with no Game Accelerator

The above key applies to the ABIT IC7 Canterwood as well, where IC7 replaces IS7 above.

Just a quick plug to for hooking us up with the 2.4C used for testing. Bob is a super guy, and tell him VL sent ya and he'll hook you up. Let's get on to testing, shall we?

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

Looking at the numbers, performance between the IS7 and IC7 are very close, though the Canterwood holds a slight edge, be it with Game Accelerator enabled or disabled. Still, the Springdale makes a strong showing here, and is not embarrassed at all.

Memory Benchmark

Here we can see the Game Accelerator make a larger impact, which it should given it's a memory optimization. Here we can see the IS7's strength with the BIOS update, as it clobbers the non-updated Canterwood. Good thing for ABIT that they released the same BIOS update for the IC7, or there would have been problems justifying the more expensive board for enthusiasts.

PC Mark 2002

The IS7 continues it's strong showing here, staying within reach of the more expensive IC7. One thing worth pointing out that memory performance is better when at Street Racer, rather than OC'd to 3GHz @ Auto. Other than that, performance trends are in line with those found in SiSoft, so maybe it's time to checkout some 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

Here we can see similar performance between the two boards. Before the Game Accelerator update, Intel's PAT gave the IC7 the edge. After the updates, both boards performed within split seconds of each other.

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

No performance differences between the Springdale and Canterwood here, as either board will serve you well when it comes to 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. The IC7 holds a slight lead over the IS7.

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

The IS7 makes a valiant effort in keeping up with the IC7, but it's clear that the Canterwood holds the fort. At Street Racer settings, the IS7 makes dramatic improvements, but so does the IC7 with the same settings enabled. Like the IC7, the IS7 shows excellent performance when overclocked, and it runs at these settings with total ease. Not bad for a chipset geared at the mainstream user.

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.

As we've seen in the benchmarks today, similar performance between ABIT's implementation of the Springdale and Canterwood.

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 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

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. What happens when we up the resolution and detail level to settings most people would play with a similar setup?

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. For those of you who can spot a 0.006203FPS difference, my hats off to you, though eye doctors will wish you dead for your lack of business.

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.

Ed. Note: A reader pointed me in the where there seems to be some issues with the mic. I'm no singer, so I didn't test it, but it may be worth checking out. There is also some discussion about sound quality issues, but I have not experienced those myself.

Hard Drive Performance

I apologize for not having any SATA drives to properly test the SATA performance. Hopefully we'll remedy this situation in the near future.

ATA Performance (Regular IDE)

Performance is in line with the last Intel ICH5 we've tested. CPU utilization is 0.5% higher, but there are fewer spikes than the last time.

Network Performance

We used 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 IC7 machine, to our IS7 box.

Download speeds averaged about 8.76MB/sec, which is about the average with the type of files used in previous tests. CPU utilization averaged about 9%, with 7% being the low mark, and 11% being the high. If you recall in our IC7 review, I slammed the 3Com PCI NIC pretty hard for it's 30% utilization, so it was nice to get back to the <10% range.

Final Words

The IS7 Max II Advance is another winner from ABIT. Performance is outstanding, as is the overclocking ability and stability. It seemed to handle the overclocking a little better than the IC7, but we hit the familiar 300FSB ceiling again here. Still, I don't think anyone will complain about the OC headroom, as 100FSB over stock should be more than enough to cover what most Pentium 4 "C" CPU's are able to manage right now.

The feature set of the board is excellent. Everything an enthusiast needs is here, such as the SATA RAID, Gigabit LAN, Hyper-Threading support and dual Channel memory. The price is right also, although I should point out that this is a fully loaded IS7. There are several versions of the board, starting as low as for the IS7, to for the IS7 Max II Advance. Note that the IC7 used in comparison today is , but it lacks SATA RAID and Gigabit LAN. Add those to the IC7, and you have a . With the Game Accelerator BIOS, the various versions of the IS7 should perform identically, so it's up to you how much you want to spend.

Is there a downside to the IS7? Well, I'm not too wild about the location of the CMOS jumper, but that is a minor nuisance. The AGP slot location is a bit too close to the memory slots, and this is a problem I would hope ABIT, and most manufacturers, would address in their future boards. Basically, these are simply board layout issues, and the IS7's strengths greatly outweigh these annoyances.

Let us remind you one thing that was obvious today… make sure your . Not everyone will have an ABIT Canterwood to compare against, but it seems likely to me that an ABIT IS7 with the Game Accelerator BIOS will make a strong argument of considering a Springdale, specifically the IS7, rather than a Canterwood. Let me make it clear though that the IC7 is still the better performer, though it will also need the Game Accelerator update to maintain it's lead. I'll let the IS7's numbers speak for themselves, though, if the extra cash for the Canterwood is worth it.

Pros: Excellent performance, overclocking and stability. Low price point.

Cons: Sound eats into the CPU, and some annoying areas in layout design.

Bottom Line: The IS7 is simply the best overall package for the P4 we've tested in quite some time. It's extremely quick, and even when pushing our memory with the Street Racer settings, the board never hiccupped once. The BIOS is an enthusiast's dream, and considering the pricing, the IS7 will certainly not disappoint you.

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

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