Abit's IC7-MAX3
The Legacy Free, OTES Cooled Canterwood Board

By Dave Altavilla
September 22, 2003

IC7-MAX3 BIOS Setup Softmenu With All The Fixings

As with all current Abit boards, the Phoenix/Award BIOS incorporates Abit's SOFTMENU technology.  In this section we found all of the settings necessary for controlling the front side bus, CPU, and AGP/PCI bus speeds.  The FSB can be raised in 1MHz steps from 100MHz all the way up to 412MHz.  Additionally, CPU core voltage selections can be made all the way up to 1.925V.  However, we don't recommend running a Northwood core much higher than 1.725 for extended periods, without an advanced cooling solution.  The AGP and PCI bus speeds can be locked in at 66/33 MHz, which prevents PCI and AGP cards from getting flaky while overclocking.  We also found options for raising the DIMM voltages in .1V steps up from 2.55V to 2.8V, as well as AGP voltage selections.  Finally, in addition to standard DRAM timing adjustments, users can select various DRAM/FSB ratios including 1:1, 2:3, and 5:4.  This will come in handy, when trying to overclock up to a 250MHz FSB and beyond, a level which can be achieved on many Pentium 4C 2.4GHz processors.

Lastly, we should note Abit's use a PAT (Performance Acceleration Technology) with the i875P chipset, which allows for reduced DRAM latency timings.  Abit coins this feature "Game Accelerator" and as you'll see in the benchmarks ahead, it works quite nicely and affords incremental performance.  "Turbo", "Street Racer" and "F1" settings are available for selection, the fastest and most aggressive of which is F1.

Hot Hardware Test Systems Fast and furious...

Benchmarking with SiSoft Sandra 2003 Pro Synthetics and low level testing

In the following SiSoftware Sandra tests, we enabled Abit's "Game Accelerator" setting in the BIOS at the "F1" setting, with 2, 2, 2, 5 timings for the DRAM.  With our Kingston HyperX PC3500 memory, this was completely stable.

CPU Test 3GHz

Multimedia Test 3GHz

The CPU and Multimedia scores here are fairly representative of a Canterwood based setup with the P4 at 3GHz, so there's nothing too earth shattering to note.  However, a look at the memory scores here will highlight the excellent performance being turned in by the IC7-MAX3, with its Game Accelerator settings turned up high to "F1".
 

SATA Hard Drive Intel

SATA Hard Drive Silicon Image

Here we've taken a snap-shot for you of each SATA controller's drive performance, with our Maxtor 80 Gig SATA drives.  As you can see, the Silicon Image controller and Intel Southbridge are neck and neck, with excellent performance exceeding the fastest Parallel ATA drive in the reference database.

Overclocking the Abit IC7-MAX3 Abit's strong suit

This area for the IC7MAX3 was, as expected, a real pleasure.  This board is supremely stable and from first power up to our heaviest stress testing, the IC7-MAX3 stood up strong and delivered what we asked of it.  We were working with an engineering sample Intel P4 at a stock speed of 3GHz.  Frankly, this CPU isn't the best overclocker but we still had good air cooled results.

This is the fastest speed this P4 CPU has ever seen, with any sort of stability.  Only the Asus P4C800 has taken this CPU to this clock speed in our labs, while many other boards have fallen well short.  All told, we were more than impressed with the IC7-MAX3's overclocking prowess.  This is easily one of the most stable boards on any platform, that we've ever tested here at HotHardware.

Winstones, 3D Studio Max and PCMark Testing