One Tough Cookie: 10 Boards with Intel i875P Chipset: Part I

Abit IC7-G: Below Expectations, Continued

A look at the connections of the Abit IC7-G.

Four RAM slots for dual DDR400 on the Abit board.

Similar to the Asus P4C800 : lateral IDE connections.

So Abit has parted from its longstanding supplier, Highpoint. Now, a few details on the test run : the manufacturer waited a while to send us a BIOS version that marginally increased performance. We also have the suspicion that Abit is struggling with the RAM interface - reasons for this could be BIOS or the board layout. From the factory, the board boots with a RAM voltage of 2.6 volts - 2.5 volts are standard. Otherwise, the boot process may abort on occasion with certain RAM modules at 2.5 volts. In addition, user-defined inputs for RAM are not accepted or are sometimes ignored : when booting, the board suddenly, automatically decreases the timings. Thus, Abit achieves the lowest performance of the entire test field - the manufacturer should do a little more fine-tuning on BIOS, at the very least. The results are shown in the table below.

The above table lists all the timings for the modules that we used, reliably read out using a diagnostic tool. One measurement for the speed is the frame rate achieved in Quake III Demo 1 (640 x 480 x 16).