ABIT IT7 MAX2 Motherboard

Company: ABIT
Product: IT7 MAX2  Rev. 1
Street Price: ~$169 USD
Date Reviewed: November 13, 2002
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Rating: (9/10)

Soft Menu III BIOS:

Overclocking is very simple and with the Soft Menu 3 setup, the user can change many options for overclocking/tweaking the system as well as finding out valuable information such as voltages and temperatures. With the SoftMenu 3 setup, the user is able to change the Front Side Bus in 1 MHz increments from 100 to 250. This is great for the extreme overclockers for the fact that you can max out any CPU and memory with FSB options that go up that high.

There are also presets for certain CPUs. For instance if you have a 1.6 Northwood you can just select the 1600 (100) in the bios. This is good for those that are not familiar with using the bios. Another big thing that is great about this board is the memory divisors. The divisor allow the memory to be set from (FSB: DRAM) 1:1, 3:4, or 4:3. This of course allows for setting the memory to run at a higher speed than the FSB. For instance. Let us say that a CPU can only run up to 150 FSB. At 150 with the 1:1 divisor the memory will only be running at 300 MHz DDR but the consumer has PC3200 memory. If he/she uses the 3:4 memory divisor then the memory will run at PC3200 (150 x 4/3 = 200).

Voltage options on the ABIT IT7 MAX2 with the stock bios allow up to 1.7v for the CPU and up to 2.8v for the VDIMM. This could be a little higher for the extreme overclockers since most want the most out of their system and need high voltage options to get there. With some other bios' for this board there are options to go even higher but in this review the A4 bios is used. Maybe in the future Abit will provide higher voltage options. There is a voltage modification for the VCore though and it can be found here in our forums. The vmod actually works for any HIP6301 / HIP6302 chip.

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