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| ABIT IC7 MAX3 A Bit Less Legacy | ||
| (Review by MS, September 28, 2003) |
Summary
Whoever said that you can't teach an old dog new tricks? The candidate in this case is the ABIT IC7, a rather prominent presence in the Canterwood scene, along with its Springdale brethren, the IS7 and the equivalent boards from ASUS, probably the top choice when it comes to a platform for the Intel Pentium4 processor.
The new trick is actually not new after all, the MAX series within ABIT's repertoire has already lost its revolutionary touch and is more of a compromise now than the first examples were then - stripped totally of any legacy support, including the PS/2 connectors. Accept the compromise, and only leave out the parallel and serial legacy, change the PCB color to black and slap on a better-designed active cooler on the MCH and there is a barebones idea for the latest spawn of the IC7 family. Replace the venerable HIP6301CB voltage controller with the more sophisticated ISL6556BCB from the same manufacturer and stick the entire VRM into a windtunnel-like design that blows the hot air out of the case, and all of a sudden, the little pieces are falling together to create an entirely new sensation of what a mainboard could look like.
They call it the MAX3 - ever wondered why?
Even if you never saw one before, the emerald glow of the VRM OTES is an unmistakable sign for the ABIT IC7 MAX3
Lately, it has become a bit crowded in the Canterwood / Springdale arena. Almost every manufacturer is competing against every other player with features and fluorescent colors or a combination of both. New buzzwords like RAID 1.5 are being created to add new names to the same old ceremony. By the end of the day, the potential buyer is left dazed and confused in front of the variety of options, often enough, those will turn out to be promises rather than reality. Moreover, often enough the buzz is used to cover up some other weaknesses based on nickel and diming on components.
We have seen a number of Canterwood and Springdale-based boards around over the past few months, and the two that we actually liked were the solutions offered by ASUS and ABIT, mostly for reasons of stability, performance and overclocking capabilities as well as the feature set coming with the boards.
In the last year, ABIT has pursued two major pushes in their mainboard repertoire, one of which has been the perfection of the mainboard VRM, i.e. four phase solutions. The second push has aimed at the ostracizing of legacy ports in an effort to get rid of all the historical baggage and to provide room for new features and / or reduce the cost overhead associated with parts and labor of adding the legacy ports. A third push from ABIT, mostly implemented in their series of graphics adapters, has been their Outside Thermal Exhaust System (OTES) technology in an attempt to prevent recycling of heat inside the case.
As nice as the original IC7 series was, it was sill blemished with a few minor flaws, among which was the somewhat noisy fan for cooling of the memory controller hub, not a big problem but nonetheless. Another small problem even though by no means the fault of ABIT has been the somewhat limited expendability of the Serial ATA interface, with two drives supported by the ICH5-R and two more by the SiliconImage 3112-R SATA controller (IC7-G only). In general, a total of four SATA drives should suffice but there is always the chance that somebody could use some extra drives for video editing and similar purposes. Finally, there was the Off-Salmon color of the PCB that was not according to everybody's liking.
Three is the lucky charm, take the riddance of legacy ports, add the four phase power and round the whole thing with another novelty, that is OTES for the mainboard and then call it Max3. What else could go wrong, er, be improved? Traditionally, the components on a mainboard that were subjected to cooling have been the North Bridge, the South Bridge, we also achieved some major improvements in stability by cooling the clock generator and the memory. In this case, however, we are looking at the VRM itself, the power factory of the mainboard, around which a windtunnel has been constructed. In theory, it makes sense, but how will this scheme hold up in practice? Did we mention yet that the PCB soldermask has changed to a charcoal black?
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