ABIT IC7-G 875P (Canterwood) Motherboard

Company: ABIT
Product: IC7-G
Street Price: ~$215 USD
Date Reviewed: May 14, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao
Overall Rating: (10/10)

Overclocking:

Using the Soft Menu options, overclocking with the IC7-G was effortless. For our testing we used a Pentium 2.4C (800 MHz FSB) processor to do some FSB testing. Since we this board is made for overclockers, we decided to skip the small increments and go ahead and shoot for a 1 GHz FSB overclock. Using a 5:4 memory ratio we got our 1 GHz overclock no problems at all. Stock voltages were used on the CPU at this speed and the system was completely stable.

Our next step was 275 FSB. AT 275 FSB, we encountered issues with our CPU. We could get into windows but no tests could be run without instability issues. The heat appeared to be the problem with our CPU running at 44C idle which is a little on the warm side for only using 1.6V. The FSB was then backed down by 5 MHz to 270. At this FSB we had stability and were able to run a few benchmarks again.

We truly believe that the motherboard could have gone much higher, possibly in to the 300 FSB realm but our CPU was holding us back. With better cooling we will know just how much more the board can go. We do plan on testing this in the future. For now, the IC7-G did just fine in the overclocking department. Doing over 1 GHz FSB is an accomplishment but we were more impressed with how easy it was with the ABIT Soft Menu options.