Abit IC7-G: Below Expectations, Continued
A look at the connections of the Abit IC7-G.
Four RAM slots for dual DDR400 on the Abit board.
Similar to the Asus P4C800 : lateral IDE connections.
So Abit has parted from its longstanding supplier, Highpoint. Now, a few details on the test run : the manufacturer waited a while to send us a BIOS version that marginally increased performance. We also have the suspicion that Abit is struggling with the RAM interface - reasons for this could be BIOS or the board layout. From the factory, the board boots with a RAM voltage of 2.6 volts - 2.5 volts are standard. Otherwise, the boot process may abort on occasion with certain RAM modules at 2.5 volts. In addition, user-defined inputs for RAM are not accepted or are sometimes ignored : when booting, the board suddenly, automatically decreases the timings. Thus, Abit achieves the lowest performance of the entire test field - the manufacturer should do a little more fine-tuning on BIOS, at the very least. The results are shown in the table below.
| Corsair XMS3200V1.1 | CL 2.0-3-3-6 (384.6) |
| Kingston KHX3500 | CL 2.0-3-3-6 (384.9) |
| OCZ PC3200 | CL 2.0-3-3-6 (380.4) |
| GeIL CL2-6-3-3 Ultra | CL 2.0-3-3-6 (382.5) |
| Kingmax MPXB62D-68KX3 | CL 2.5-3-3-8 (389.1) |
| takeMS mMS64D32000U-5 | CL 2.0-3-3-6 (383.7) |
| Infineon HYS64D32300GU-5-B | CL 3.0-3-3-8 (379.8) |
The above table lists all the timings for the modules that we used, reliably read out using a diagnostic tool. One measurement for the speed is the frame rate achieved in Quake III Demo 1 (640 x 480 x 16).
