Stability, overclocking and compatibility
Our primary concern here at Hexus isn't necessarily performance, differing motherboards based one chipset usually perform within a few percentage points of each other. What is imperative, however, is having absolute stability. All the performance in the world counts for very little when you encounter unexpected crashes and poor reliability in general.
Indeed, with reference to this very point, ABIT proudly emblazon their motherboards with a sub-heading of "Your Reliable Partner". ABIT employ a 3-phase power solution. 6 transistors are used to regulate the heat produced from supplying the CPU with the correct current as opposed to the industry-standard 4. The cooler running transistors should allow for a more stable platform, something that all manufacturers are striving for.
To test the stability of the ABIT IT7, we raised the CPU voltage to maximum permissible amount, 1.7v. We also raised the DDR voltage to 3.0v to add a little more heat into the equation. Not content with simply raising voltages, we raised the speed of our test CPU from its native 1600MHz to 2600Mhz.
Our stability tests include playing the latest games, running Prime95 for hours on end, running SETI and 3DMark concurrently, basically anything that loaded the motherboard in differing ways. I'm glad to report that over 12 hours of our best efforts to unstabilise the IT7 came to nothing, it simply took everything we threw at it and asked for more. The hallmark of a stable motherboard is the ability to run at substantially increased clock speeds and voltages with the same stability as one would expect at stock speeds, this is exactly how the IT7 behaves.
We also had reasonably high hopes on the overclocking front. Previous I845D motherboards have shown an aptitude for overclocking, with the FSB being limited not by the motherboard but by the CPU. My personal motherboard, the EpoX 4BDA2+, managed to reach 170FSB with excellent stability once enough voltage was applied to my 1.6A NW.
We had initial misgivings as the ABIT IT7 offered only 1.7v Vcore. Still, we set it to 1.7v and started raising the FSB whilst keeping the PCI fixed. It passed 150FSB without breaking a sweat, 160FSB came and went. We eventually settled for an impressive 170FSB with excellent stability. We're sure that our relative lack of CPU voltage hindered our efforts to pinpoint the exact FSB limit of the IT7. The IT7 is rated to perform at 133FSB, it performs at 170FSB with the same stability, impressive. Here's a SiSoft Sandra shot showing our overclock.
For motherboard compatibility testing, we used 3 different video cards, the NVIDIA Geforce4 Ti4600, NVIDIA Geforce3 and ATI Radeon 32MB DDR. All installed without any problems whatsoever. We also tried 3 different brands of PC2700 RAM, running in isolation and all three at one time. We found that it wasn't as stable as we would have wished when we chose aggressive memory timings and high FSBs with all three slots filled. Unexplained crashes occurred on a seemingly regular basis. This instability only occurred once we tried running at 155+ FSB and 2/5/2/2 memory timings. Still, when set to 133FSB, and with all three DIMM slots populated, the IT7 proved itself to be as stable as any motherboard we've tested.
Different PCI cards were used in different slots to reflect normal usage. The combination of Windows XP and the IT7 ensured that the transition between cards was seamless.
Another issue that we ran into with our engineering BIOS was the fact that the IT7 cleared CMOS when we switched it off at the mains. Our settings had to be manually inputted each time. We're sure a BIOS update will cure this, however.
Overall, we're pretty pleased with the stability, overclockability and compatibility of the IT7.
