Abit IC7-Max3, Continued

Abit has the Award Flash utility integrated right into the BIOS so that it can be updated by diskette without having to boot up an operating system. Furthermore, Abit has once again integrated the CPU soft menu into the BIOS according to longstanding tradition, with which all clock speeds and settings (FSB/AGP/PCI/memory) and power voltages can be adjusted.

Under Advanced Chipset Setup, there are additional options for operating the main memory, which are not provided by competitors. Abit groups these together under the heading of Game Accelerator. The Auto and Turbo options should work most of the time, although you should only consider 'Street Racer' and 'F1' with really high-quality DIM modules.

Unfortunately the Abit board doesn't correctly read the EPROM of our test memory from Corsair: CL 2.5-3-2-6 is used standard instead of CL 2.0-3-2-6. That isn't so awful, as the difference in performance is minimal. However, it does slightly soil this otherwise spotless board.

Of course, with this variety of extra features, things are a bit tight on the motherboard. We haven't yet mentioned the IDE interfaces positioned at 90° angle, which we neither see as a plus or a minus. The SATA connections are awkwardly placed on the bottom edge of the motherboard, and this means that the included cables won't reach up to a backplane in the upper part of a big tower.