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 Bundled Accessories:

The necessary manuals and drivers are provided with the IC7 MAX3. Also included are two SATA power cables, a floppy cable, an IDE cable, I/O shield plate, and four SATA cables. A funny thing about SATA drives is not all of them come with power cables. When the drives were first introduced people were upset to receive a drive with no power cable. ABIT has solved this problem by offering two sets of cables, capable of powering four drives.

A new feature being included with ABIT motherboards is Security IDE. What it does is all the data that is stored on your drive gets encrypted by the Security IDE (eNOVA X-Wall chipset). Then the only way that your data can be accessed is if the IEEE key is plugged in to decode the data. So unless someone has an identical key as yours (not possible really) they cannot get the data off of your drive even if they have the drive. This is great for business users, government offices, or whoever needs their data to be private and protected. The Security IDE will only support one drive so we suggest that if you have multiple drives that you put all the important information on one drive and use the Security IDE on it. Protection like this is great but you must use the key every time you boot your computer and then it can be removed after the machine has fully booted. For more information concerning Security IDE please refer to ABIT's website.

The last item included in the bundle is an extra USB/FireWire bracket that has two USB ports and two FireWire ports. This adds up to a grand total of six USB ports and three FireWire connections included with the MAX3. This should be plenty, even for the power users.