ABIT has always built boards for the PC enthusiast. The IC7 Max-3 is no different its a great board if you like to play with your hardware. Its packed with optional extra s for expansion, overclocking and security. The Max-3 is the fully featured version of the IC7 series. It has everything this series has to offer, including secure IDE, fan EQ, Thermal Guard, Tweak Guard, soft menu and much more. IC7 Max-3 is build around the Intel 875P chipset which offers a range of features including much sort after Dual Channel DDR.

Its worth pointing out that this motherboard has gone to the height of the technology at the time. This has a detrimental effect to those of you with older peripherals. What I am meaning by this is the lack of serial and Parallel ports on this motherboard. So any of you that have not totally changed over to USB and Firewire components may have a small problem unless you are planning on upgrading them as well. I would guess that most of you will be totally USB dependant by now.

If your looking for expansion in terms of storage and optical drives then the IC7 Max-3 is at the top of the tree. The south Bridge can handle two Serial ATA drives, then Abit have added 2 separate Serial ATA controllers each being able to handle 2 drives each. Then the two standard IDE ports can handle another 2 devices each. This allows you to have anything up to 10 devices connected at any one time. I fail to see a home use for this but you never know and its never hurts to have extra features at your disposal just on the off chance that you may require it.

Motherboard Features

OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System)

OTES is a unique feature to Abit where the hottest parts of the motherboard (Capacitors and Mosfets) are all put under a plastic casing which leads to an exhaust fan. The exhaust fan removes the hot air from these areas and channels it straight out of the case. This really helps with the overall case temp as it also removes some of the hot air that surrounds the CPU. On top of all that the plastic casing is fitted with 3 LED's so you modders with clear cases will have an extra little feature to look at.

Secure IDE

Secure IDE is a device that can encrypt and decrypt the entire hard disk bit by bit (including boot sector, temp files, swap files and the operating system) with real-time performance using the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) certified DES (Data Encryption Standard) algorithms. You cannot however use Secure IDE with your Serial ATA drives. This technology is only for standard parallel IDE ports.

SoftMenu III

This is the original reason why Abit were so popular with the overclocking community. The SoftMenu BIOS allows you to alter the setting for your CPU, AGP/PCI bus and voltages for memory etc from the BIOS. The BIOS for the IC7 MAX-3 allows you to get the FSB speed set from 100 all the way to 412Mhz. Remember of course the the P4 is Quad Pumped so for a standard P4 at 800Mhz you would set the FSB to 200Mhz. So theoretically you could get the FSB for the CPU to run at 1648Mhz (I suggest you don't do this) but the point is there you can overclock all the way to what is stable without running out of options.

Also you have the ability to lock the other bus speeds when increasing the FSB. This is essential when overclocking to high speeds as more often than not the PCI and AGP buses can't handle much of a speed increase.

Chipset Features

Dual DDR400

With dual channel DDR you have the ability to double the speed of your already speed doubled memory modules. Two DDR400 capable memory controllers allow you to transmit twice the data from the memory to the CPU under heavy memory load conditions.

AGP 8x

Firstly it has AGP 8x support so you can fully utilize those latest graphics cards such as the Geforce FX and the Radeon 9800. This provides an AGP bus bandwidth of 2.1Gb/s instead of the 1.1Gb/s provided with the AGP 4x specification. With more and more complex textures coming into games the AGP bus speed is getting more and more important all the time as On-Card memory is not large enough to handle everything.

USB 2.0

USB 2.0 is up to 40 times faster than the standard USB1.1 ports. This is great news if you are using external Hard Disks CD-Drives or scanning large pictures on a USB scanner. with 480Mbs transfer rate there will be no slow down is your USB transmission.

IEE1394

Supports 400/200/100Mb/sec data transfer rate. Also known as FireWire, its used to connect Audio/visual devices such as camera's and camcorders to your PC for a high speed digital transfer.

Motherboard Specifications

• CPU
  Supports Intel Pentium 4 Socket 478 processors with 800/533 MHz Front Side Bus
  Supports Intel Hyper-Threading Technology
   

• Chipset
  Intel 875P / ICH5 RAID
  Support Intel CSA Gigabit LAN
  Supports Dual Channel DDR 400 with ECC function
  Supports Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) function
  Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)
   

• Memory
  Four 184-pin DIMM sockets
  Supports 4 DIMM Dual DDR 400 memory.(Max. 4GB)
  Supports configurable ECC function
   

• AGP
  Accelerated Graphics Port connector supports AGP PRO 8X/4X (0.8V/1.5V)
   

• Gigabit LAN
  On board Intel CSA Gigabit LAN
   

• Dual SATA RAID
  2 channel SATA 150MB/s data transfer rate with RAID function (0/1) via South Bridge
  4 channel SATA 150MB/s data transfer rate with RAID function (0/1/0+1) via Silicon Image PCI Chip
   

• Audio
  6-Channel AC 97 CODEC on board
  Professional digital audio interface supports 24-bit S/P DIF optical In/Out
   

• ABIT Engineered™
  ABIT SoftMenu™ Technology
  ABIT FanEQ™ Technology
  ABIT CPU ThermalGuard™
  ABIT FlashMenu™
  ABIT TweakGuard™
  ABIT FanSecure™
  ABIT OTES™ Technology
   

• IEEE 1394
  Supports IEEE 1394a at 100/200/400 Mb/s transfer rate
   

• Internal I/O Connectors
  1 x AGP, 5 x PCI slots
  1x Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB
  2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100 Connectors
  6 x SATA 150 Connectors
  2 x USB 2.0 headers, 2 x IEEE 1394a header
  1 x CD-IN, 1 x AUX-IN
   

• Back Panel I/O
  1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse
  1 x S/PDIF Out connector, 1 x S/PDIF In connector
  1 x Audio connectors (Front Speaker, Line-in, Mic-in)
  1 x Audio connectors (Center/Sub, Surround Speaker)
  2 x USB 2.0, 1 x IEEE 1394a
  2 x USB 2.0, 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector
   

• Miscellaneous
  ATX form factor
  Hardware monitoring – Including Fan speeds, Voltages, System environment temperature

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