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Abit IS7 (Springdale) Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Monday, May 26, 2003
Conclusion
For a long time ABIT has been very popular with the enthusiast crowd due in part to their quality of work, and impressive package of overclocking and tweaking controls, and the IS7 is no exception. Right out of the box the IS7 ran strong, stable and will actually go down in Ninjalane history as one of the few motherboards to finish a benchmarking session in less than a day.
The board layout of the IS7 is very good, and appears to be oriented around what enthusiasts already do. There is ample space between the AGP and first PCI slot allowing that much needed "breathing room" for your video card. This comes at a price however since any memory upgrade will have to happen with the video card removed. The only gripe with the layout is the rather small Northbridge cooler and split power connections.
Overclocking with the IS7 was quick and very easy to do. However given the current cooling method the IS7 would not run stable at 1000Mhz FSB with our boxed Pentium 4 3.0C processor. Granted 500Mhz is still very decent overclock, especially considering the starting point, though I believe with a better cooling method and lower speed processor the "sweet spot" of 250Mhz x 4 is easily attainable.
All in all the Abit IS7 is a very solid board with enough features to make just about anyone happy
Now for the ever popular list of Good things and Bad things.
The board layout of the IS7 is very good, and appears to be oriented around what enthusiasts already do. There is ample space between the AGP and first PCI slot allowing that much needed "breathing room" for your video card. This comes at a price however since any memory upgrade will have to happen with the video card removed. The only gripe with the layout is the rather small Northbridge cooler and split power connections.
Overclocking with the IS7 was quick and very easy to do. However given the current cooling method the IS7 would not run stable at 1000Mhz FSB with our boxed Pentium 4 3.0C processor. Granted 500Mhz is still very decent overclock, especially considering the starting point, though I believe with a better cooling method and lower speed processor the "sweet spot" of 250Mhz x 4 is easily attainable.
All in all the Abit IS7 is a very solid board with enough features to make just about anyone happy
Now for the ever popular list of Good things and Bad things.
The Good Things
Dual Channel DDR 400
Orange PCB
SerialATA w/RAID
800Mhz Pentium 4 Processor Support
Active Northbridge cooling
Onboard Firewire
Impressive set of overclocking controls
Orange PCB
SerialATA w/RAID
800Mhz Pentium 4 Processor Support
Active Northbridge cooling
Onboard Firewire
Impressive set of overclocking controls
The Bad Things
Low latency memory incompatibility
No AGP Pro slot
AGP slot blocks memory clips
No AGP Pro slot
AGP slot blocks memory clips
Ninjalane Rating
