Abit IP35

Josh Collins avoids the dark raider and takes the IP35 for a spin around the block

With the words on the box stating ‘dark raider’, we couldn’t help but wonder whether we’re going to open the box to a piece of silicon with electronics scattered all over it or some gothic horseman of the night ready to decapitate us, continuing on to then take our woman. With our shotgun ready, we opened it.

What we found was the quaint IP35. A budget level motherboard from the folks at Abit and at least from first glance we felt we needn’t worry about any romance-novel-cover marauder.

The board is fairly feature-packed for the relatively cheap price of $149. There are six SATA II ports connected to the ICH9R south bridge – RAID, two FireWire ports, one PCIe 16x slot and a gigabit LAN connection; this board is set to provide a high level of connectivity, interaction and immersion for solid value.

Obviously, being a budget board, there are features that are either reduced or removed completely when compared to its fully fledged brethren, the IP35 Pro. Such features include the secondary PCIe x16 slot for CrossFire support, support for DDR2-1066 memory at stock, eSATA, the uGuru overclocking utility and dual Ethernet.

We thought this would leave the Abit IP35 in good stead for battle within the market; then we checked out the other two big boys in the budget sandbox. ASUS and GIGABYTE have two extremely competitive boards within the $140 to $170 price bracket in the form of the P5K and P35-DS3P respectively. Both pack a punch with a clear difference between those boards and the Abit offering; the P5K and P35-DS3P include support for two PCIe 16x slots, all solid capacitors and the capacity to overclock past 500MHz, even 550MHz or further given the right conditions and a good processor.

Using a chip known to hit just shy of 600MHz FSB we tested the Abit IP35 and were disappointed to say the least. The board struggled with FSB overclocking, managing a mere 400MHz FSB and a max of 425MHz FSB that could only be obtained by utilising SetFSB to raise the FSB from within Windows. No 500+MHz front side bus system here, ladies and gents.

Not only were the FSB limits a disappointment, but solid state capacitors are only used around the socket and MOSFET area – at least they were used here, rather than not at all. When up against other brands utilising solid state capacitors over the whole board, it does make it harder to compete. To put the final nail in its own coffin, Abit then implemented only four-phase power for the CPU socket. This has an adverse effect on the clean and uninterrupted power supply to the CPU; this is especially important when considering stable overclocks.

With the board generally restricted to low FSB frequencies and lower dividers compared to high-end motherboards, the saving grace should be memory tweaking. Well, that’s your problem, right there – the board has no option to run a CAS3 latency. Oddly, this lack of optimal numeration is only on the CAS latency setting (tCL) while tRCD and tRP can be set down to a value of three. Also odd was the lack of tRAS options, with the lowest value being nine – again, it’s obvious no one’s going to be running DDR2-800 3-3-3-8 on this board! This type of memory performance was once set aside for those with deep pockets but with Micron D9 based DDR2 being excessively cheap, quality sticks can be found for a bargain.

The board starts as a stealthy knight, but then fades to the level of court jester all too quickly in the presence of the big boys.