Bundle and presentation
The IC7-MAX3 replaces the IC7-G as ABIT's 'best' consumer-level Pentium 4 motherboard to date. The one large difference, however, and partly on show on the left, is the OTES cooling system employed on this mainboard. That's right, a specialised cooling system on a motherboard, designed to keep the voltage regulation delivery system cool. More on that later.
Part one of the bundle contains the expected driver CD, multi-language manual that's pretty good and a quick installation guide. The driver CD contains all the various drivers for the plethora of on-board features, Acrobat Reader, Award Flash, DX9.0a, LoFormat utility, ABIT's hardware monitoring software and a manual in Acrobat format. It would be nice if we had a one-button hardware installation function, such that all the features would be installed correctly with just a couple of keystrokes. SATA drivers, on a floppy disk, give one the option of using a multi-SATA storage array.
ABIT has decided to distinguish this board from all others with a couple of hither-to unseen touches. The SecureIDE feature is exactly that. The little PCB connects to a standard IDE drive and the other side allows the user to attach a normal IDE cable to the PC's ports. The idea is that the SecureIDE chip affords extra security. The grey lead, to the left of the above picture, plugs into the device and is then fed through a PCI plate and out of the back. Either one of the two duplicate keys must then be entered into the FireWire-like socket for the PC to boot. Once booted, the key can be removed. Please note that the IDE drive needs to be formatted after the SecureIDE feature is installed. Just make sure you don't lose your keys !.
Cabling is plentiful. With 6 SATA ports to service, ABIT bundles in 4 cables and a couple of power cables (2 power ports on each). Rounded cables, a very customised I/O shield (note the fan cutout ?) and a multi-bracket that provides 2 USB2.0 and 2 FireWire ports (4 and 6-pin) round off the package. Pretty good.
