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| ABIT IC7 A Bit of Canterwood | ||
| (Review by MS, June 1, 2003) |
Summary
Amongst the few surviving mainboard manufacturers, ABIT is probably one of the most controversial players. Some of their boards are great, some are not so great but all of them are somewhat different from all those uniform PCBs, set apart from each other only by their color scheme. ABIT's SoftMenu BIOS configuration utility is legendary by now and most of the boards have a great reputation for overclocking.
The hottest silicon in the current chipset market is Intel's i875P a.k.a Canterwood. The chipset has already received sufficient coverage all over the web for us to skip most of the features here. Interesting, though, is the controversy enveloping the new performance acceleration technology. Originally conceived as a permanent feature of Canterwood it appears as if the one and the other mainboard manufacturer have found ways to disable it for the sake of greater stability in higher density system memory configurations. Likewise, there are rumors about automatic disabling PAT under overclocked conditions.
None of these issues appear to originate at Intel directly, for sure not the sacrilegious overclocking, it is all being cooked up in the labs in Taiwan with a lot of secret sauce at every single manufacturer. For once, therefore, the fun is back in reviewing Intel chipset boards, Canterwood and Springdale are like a box of chocolate .... we haven't had that in a long time. So, which flavor is Abit's IC7?
Another futuristic cooler from ABIT
Hardly any chipset has made as much impact lately as Intel's new Canterwood. The high-speed version of the workstation-class Granite Bay chipset is currently the undisputed champion in the P4 arena. Take the Canterwood chipset, give it to ABIT's designers and let them play and what comes out is something like the IC7. Or the IC7-G with the "G" standing for Gigabit LAN using CSA technology. Within Intel's design specifications, there are not too many possibilities to stray either left or right. The Northern hemisphere of the board is pretty much predefined by the layout of the North Bridge - DIMM configuration, and it is mostly on the I/O level where variations on the Canterwood theme are possible.
There are still a few exceptions, though. One area where everybody always appears to know it all and come up with the secret ingredients is the VRM, short for voltage regulator module. It really does not appear to matter what the reference designs call for, in most cases, there will be a less sophisticated solution to shave off another 2¢ from the manufacturing price. Hardly ever is it that we see a manufacturer going the opposite way and actually exceeding the specs. This, however, is exactly the area where ABIT has ruffled some feathers lately.
Another "split-decision" in Canterwood designs concerns the question: "To RAID or not to RAID?" We have gone already over the gory details of the ICH5 supporting RAID 0 only; for any fault tolerant system, this is not really acceptable and, thus, creates the opportunity for third party manufacturers such as Promise and SiliconImage to place their products on the new breed of mainbard. Briefly, the situation causes some sort of a conundrum in that the device with the highest bandwidth requirement is stuck with the PCI bus as backbone. For all practical purposes, this still does not appear to matter, however, for benchmarks it does and moreover certain benchmarks such as HDTach are plain and simply out of their league and generate incorrect data.
Last not least, there is the issue of on-board sound. For years, the onboard sound of Intel boards has been a testimony of the commensurate relationship between Intel and Analog Devices. The drawback is that AD has one of the worst track records in the industry when it comes to supporting their own devices with drivers, leaving the end user often enough at the mercy of OEMs or driver collection sites who just happen to have a compatible piece of software posted in their download section.
Time to check out what we got here and how much is flash and dance and how much is real with the IC7. And whatever happens to PAT under the various operating conditions?
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