| 
Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., November 19, 2003 - By consistently
making products that deliver performance above and beyond what is expected,
ABIT has always been the enthusiast's favorite. The editors
at Hard|OCP took the AI7 put it through
a battery of tests. What they found out was that the AI7, despite its
demure price tag, delivers impressive performance, saying: "In
the budget board category, the ABIT AI7 is going to be very hard to beat.
HardOCP has no problems suggesting that you make it the board for your
next upgrade or for that computer geek on your holiday shopping list."
The AI7 is one of the first boards to include µGuru™,
an ABIT Engineered processor which provides real time monitoring and tweaking
from within Windows. Here's what Hard|OCP had to say about the convenience
of ABIT BlackBox™, one of the many functions of µGuru™: "The BlackBox
applet is an error reporting tool, with which you can record system specifications
and submit the generated report directly to ABIT's Support department.
This BlackBox feature basically simplifies the technical support process
in that it collects all critical hardware and software information needed
from your system to help diagnose the issue. This way, all you have to
focus on is telling support about the issue you are having instead of
listing 3 pages of system specs."
The AI7 continues the ABIT tradition of unmatched performance. Here's
Hard|OCP's experience with AI7 overclocking: "The AI7 is proof
that a budget board does not mean budget performance. Using a Koolance
EXOS water cooling system to cool the CPU, we were able to get the board
to a maximum FSB of 275 with the memory running at an effective 220 MHz
using a 5:4 CPU:DRAM ratio. For synchronous overclocking, we were able
to hit 250MHz easily with the board."
But what good is speed without stability? Here's Hard|OCP's take on that
subject: "Once again we have taken an ABIT board out of the box
and run it at stock and overclocked speeds with aggressive memory settings
virtually error free. Actually, outside of pushing the board beyond the
MHz mentioned above, there were no failures. Over 100 repetitions of Winstone
testing revealed no weaknesses. We looped 3DMark01 overnight as well with
Prime95 running in the background and could not crash our ABIT AI7. Stability
seems to be a cornerstone that the ABIT AI7 was built on."
The verdict? "The AI7 board definitely does not disappoint. Out
of the box, I had no problems with installation or use of the board. The
layout of the board is superb…The board's performance both in the benchmark
and the subsystem tests was amazing to say the least. The fact that this
budget i865PE board could keep pace with, and in some cases outrun, the
faster stock i875P board speaks volumes to the performance of this board...All
in all, a solidly designed solution in the grand tradition of all that
is ABIT."
For the full review, go to:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTQx
For more information on ABIT and ABIT Engineered products, go to: http://www.abit.com.tw
| 
