ABIT IC7 MAX3 (875P): New Overclocking Champion?

Company: ABIT
Product: IC7 MAX3
Street Price: $225 USD
Date Reviewed: September 25, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

ABIT IC7 MAX3 Onboard Features:

The IC7 MAX3 sports a healthy rear I/O configuration. As you can see, the board has two PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, S/PDIF in and out, audio jacks (front speaker, line-in, mic-in, center/sub, and surround speaker), four USB 2.0 connectors, a RJ-45 LAN connector, and an IEEE 1394a connector. We like this setup because we have seen some manufacturers provide the S/PDIF connectors and audio connectors on extra PCI brackets. With the MAX 3 all of the necessary jacks are found on the rear I/O. It is also important to note that most of the latest board do not provide S/PDIF in and out jacks.

Serial ATA is the latest wave in hard drives. The increase in transfer rates compared to IDE and other benefits such as hot swapping make these drives very appealing. The ICH5-R supports two independent serial ATA devices as well as SATA RAID 0/1 configurations. ABIT has also added the Silicon Image 3114 serial ATA host controller. This chip allows for four more independent Serial ATA devices. The Sil 3114 supports RAID 0/1/0+1 functions. Overall there are total of six SATA connections making this a great board for large storage applications such as servers.

Intel's 82547EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller provides the LAN capabilities on the motherboard. The chip bypasses the PCI bus and connects to the CSA (Communication Streaming Architecture) bus in the 875P chipset. This overcomes the bandwidth limitation found when running on the PCI bus, thus freeing up the bandwidth for other I/O operations. Gigabit Ethernet is slowly becoming common place and will eventually replace 100Mbit. The addition of Intel CSA Gigabit LAN, again makes this board a good candidate for server/workstation applications.

Since the 875P does not have native FireWire support, ABIT has implemented the Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 controller. This gives the board the ability to support up to three IEEE 1394a devices such as digital camcorders, hard drives, printers, and digital cameras. It supports transfer rates up to 400Mbps. If you have not already noticed, there is only one FireWire connection on the rear I/O panel, but included with the MAX3 is an extra PCI bracket that has the two other ports.

Last but not least is the Realtek ALC650, which is an 18-bit, full duplex AC'97 2.2 compatible stereo audio CODEC. This is also where the MAX3 gets its S/PDIF in and out support. There are quite a few people who will plug their computers into their home stereo systems or vice versa and with the ALC650, it is possible.

As you can see so far, the MAX3 is almost identical to the IC7-G. Most of the onboard features are the same except that the MAX3 is capable of running six SATA devices thanks to the Silicon Image 3114 host controller and the native support offered by the 875P chipset. So what exactly makes this board so much different? Well we are about to find out.