Conclusion and thoughts
We alluded to the three characteristics emblazoned on the IC7-G's box cover, namely speed, stability and power. We'd put stability on top of our requirements list. In this respect the IC7-G doesn't disappoint. We threw as much as we could at it, 4 DIMMs populated, tight timings, PCI slots occupied, and strenuous testing couldn't make it fail. There's been mention that the IC7-G, amongst others, may not be perfectly suited to a Prometeia cooling system. That, however, is about the only incompatibility that we can see. In terms of speed, it's just a shade slower than we had expected. Even when we factor out the ASUS Canterwood's faster overall CPU speed, the ABIT is a hair's breadth slower. Will you notice this performance deficit without rigorous benchmarking, we think not.The current Canterwood and Springdale market is chock-full of excellent boards. It seems as if all the manufacturers want to bundle as many useful extras as they can. ABIT, thankfully, allow you to use most of their extras immediately. The presentation is immaculate, and the back I/O panel is one of the most useful we've seen this year. It almost goes without saying that the BIOS is excellent but we'll say it nonetheless. We like boards that do exactly what their specifications promise. The IC7-G set up perfectly and ran flawlessly. Overclocking was limited to only 270FSB or so, a little lower than some we've seen recently. That's a little underwhelming given the active cooling on the Northbridge. We must temper this by stating that you shouldn't simply purchase a particular board if a sample has hit an incredible FSB. We simply don't have a large enough sample to unequivocally state that one manufacturer is surpassing others in terms of overclocking potential. We very much doubt Intel give preferential chipset treatment to any major manufacturer
Another decent board. 'Decent' seems to be a word that's been used with increasingly regularity with respect to Springdale and Canterwood boards. That underlines the fact that it's difficult to go wrong with these feature-filled motherboards.
