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 (Cont):

In the Advanced Chipset Features, there are options for changing the memory timings. This allows for more tweaking on the memory settings and make the memory perform better. Another memory option is the Enhance DRAM Performance, which again pushes the ram a little harder and makes it perform better. There are also options for tweaking the AGP Slot by enabling options so as AGP Fast Write and 4x AGP. Something that is a little disappointing is that this board does not support 8x AGP, which is not very bad, but it would be nice to have.

Continuing through the BIOS there are options for disabling some of the onboard features like the RAID and the sound. Also available is the hardware monitoring in the PC Health Status Menu. One is able to view the CPU temperature as well as the system temperatures on the motherboard. There are some other good options such as Shut Down When CPU Fail, which will turn off the computer if it does not detect a working fan. Then there is the CPU Shutdown Temperature option, which allows the user to choose a temperature at which the motherboard will power down if the temperature ever reaches the one specified. This is a great option for those that are paranoid about their CPU overheating while they are away or unable to monitor their computer.

Of course, there are many other options in the bios but these are regarded as some of the more important ones.

Setup and Testing:

Tests:
  · Prime 95
  · 3DMarks 2001 SE
  · SiSoft Sandra 2002 SP1 Standard
  · PCMark 2002

Setting the computer up was very easy. Since most of the things are provided onboard, none of the PCI slots were used. Everything was pretty much plug and play. After hooking up all the connections and powering on the motherboard, everything ran just fine. No problems occurred at all on boot-up. During the course of this review, the motherboard was stable. There was never an instance where there was a problem such as a blue screen etc. until the system was overclocked but that is how it is supposed to be.

Setting the system at stock of 133 FSB with memory 1:1 everything ran fine. For stability, Prime 95 was used since it usually detects any issues with parts that would cause instabilities.

Overclocking:

Overclocking with this motherboard using the SoftMenu III Bios was very easy. The system was able to go to 173FSB with ease. For the voltages 1.7v Vcore was used and 2.8V on the memory. The memory was running at 3:4 (FSB: DRAM) which means it was running at a nice 461 MHz DDR with the SPD settings for the memory timings! This a very nice overclock and it was very easy. The board could definitely go higher but the CPU would need to be cooled more as it was the bottlenecking factor. This same CPU with some extreme cooling on it has gone up to 195 FSB on the IT7 MAX motherboard so there has to be plenty of juice left. For the purpose of this review, only air-cooling was used.

Once all the proper voltages were applied everything ran very smoothly even at the speeds stated earlier. Running Prime 95 for hours was no problem at all. This is very impressive and the BIOS was very easy to use.

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