Abit includes almost everything you’ll need to hook up all of your devices in the box. One black rounded IDE, one black rounded floppy cable along with six SATA cables and some nice molex to SATA power cables are included in the box. It would have been nice to have another dual IDE cable but given the board’s capabilities, it’s not too unexpected. Abit also tossed in an additional set of USB/1394 headers on a rear bracket (for a total of eight USB headers and three 1394 headers).
The
IC7-Max 3 also comes with the Secure IDE system which is a hardware based encryption system that allows you to protect data. In order to access the data, you need to have one of the two firewire keys installed on the computer. Without either of these keys, the data is locked away from prying eyes. And it's OS independent so it doesn't matter if your run Linux, Windows, or some other operating system. I was going to try this system out but I tend to lose things and I kind of need the data on my hard drive.
I ran into my first problem when I got everything installed, powered up the system and began to re-install the OS. The Intel 875 chipset used by the IC7 requires high speed memory, at least PC3200, so my two sticks of Crucial PC2700 RAM were not quite fast enough to create a stable environment. This caused all kinds of fun instability problems until I installed two 512 MB sticks of Kingston Hyper-X PC4000 RAM, Then life was good.
I tested the motherboard with the Kingston RAM, Radeon 9800 Pro, and a Pentium 4 2.66 (the old 533 FSB chip, not one of the fancy 800 FSB chips). I did some benchmarks with the BH7 but the switch in RAM invalidated the benchmarks (for those who care the motherboard and faster RAM generated about a 10 percent increase in performance). Here are some performance benchmarks
| Final Fantasy XI | 4799 |
| X2 Rolling Demo | 94.857 |
| Commanche 4 Benchmark | 51.01 |
| 3dMark | 5541 |
| PCMark04 | 3495 |
| Aquamark | 39,249 |
Page 2 of 3
