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IT7-MAX Review, Page 2:
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On the left is a shot of the entire motherboard. The only thing that I would change about this entire board is the passive heatsink on the Northbridge (right pic). I would prefer some active cooling just because I push my hardware pretty hard.
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I robbed the Northbridge heatsink and fan off the "piece of crap" MSI 845 Ultra-ARU that I reviewed a few months ago. I knew it would be good for something! Heh. But, the ugly MSI logo needs to come off...
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Now, that's much better! This was a quick and easy mod, and now I have a fan cooled Northbridge. Now I'm ready to do some overclocking!
Benchmarks:
Test Rig:
- Pentium4 2.4B (133FSB)
- Volcano 7+ heatsink/fan
- 512MB PC2700 Kingston DDR memory
- 2x Maxtor 40GB 7200 RPM HDDs, RAID-0
- 1x Western Digital 120GB SE Caviar
- ABIT Siluro GeForce4 Ti4400 o/c'ed to Ti4600 spec. 1024x768 res 32 bit color
- Cisco Aeronet340 Wireless LAN adapter
- Turbolink 420 watt switching PSU
- Windows XP Professional, SP1
- Sisoft Sandra 2003 Professional
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I won't go into a long winded analysis of the benchmarks. The numbers pretty much speak for themselves. The ABIT IT7-MAX scored exceptionally well on all Sandra benchmarks with the exception of the memory bandwidth which was slightly lower than they should be. All other benchmarks are outstanding. You may notice that the CPU benchmark is well above the Sandra baseline for a 2.4B. I re-ran this benchmark several times to make sure that it was correct, and it is. I can't account for why it scored so high, but I assure you that the numbers are correct.
Overclocking:
Without any vcore modification, I was able to get the Pentium4 2.4B up to 2.7Ghz with no voltage increase. Then to hit 2.85Ghz I had to up the vcore to 1.6 volts. The highest stable speed I was able to attain was 2.94Ghz at 1.7 volts vcore.
I was actually able to get Windows XP to boot and run at 3Ghz, with a core voltage of 1.7, which is the highest vcore setting in the BIOS. Unfortunately, running Sandra caused the system to hang or crash. A voltage mod would have to be done to run stable at over 3Ghz.
Conclusion:
The ABIT IT7-MAX is one ass kicking motherboard. It packs more features than should be legal, and it is ahead of the competition in almost every aspect. ABIT took a chance on innovation and it payed off. I have had the IT7-MAX running in my main rig for a couple of months now with absolutely zero problems, and being a performance enthusiast I can honestly say that this is one of the best overclocking motherboards I have owned. Being rid of all the legacy deadwood is simply a dream come true and the sound system on this board is nothing short of excellent. In fact, I tossed my SoundBlaster Live 5.1 soundcard, and use the onboard sound now. This is one Extreme motherboard and it is well deserved of our best rating - 5 X's!
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