review of Abit MOBO IT7

[ranga5]

Planning to build a new intel 2.2 P4 system.Of the many mother boards seen i came across one that looked tops. Abit-IT7.P4-478 fsb 400/533mhz, DDR200/266,1agp,4pci slots, 2ATA controllers 4ATA 133 Raid via hp 374, 10usb2.0,realtek alc650 5.1.No lagacy ports.Any opinion pl. Havent seen any review on this. Looks great. Like any opinion good/bad before ordering. thks

[BipolarBill]

OMG! An Intel motherboard with a VIA USB 2.0 controller? Travesty! The end of the world as we know it! That board will self-destruct in 15 seconds!

Kidding. ;)

If you're sure that you'll never need a parallel port or a serial port, go for it. Actually, you can add those with a card later if you like. Me? I find those legacy ports to be handy from time to time.

Welcome to SysOpt!

[otheos]

Well, really a marketing gizmo, to sell at higher prices, as there's still no such thing as legacy free. By removing usefull ports (serial/parallel/ps2) all you have is less functionality. You sitll have an ISA bus, although I wouldnt mind Peter's view of this.

Anyhow, make sure you need all the onboard stuff, cause you definitely pay for them.

[doesitmatter]

I have this board and a p4 1.6 overclocked to 2.3 I like it although the raid 0 I have set is less then impressive right now it benchmarks are less then a non raid ata 100 and I am using 2 maxtor ata133 7200rpm in a raid 0 I may have to set the block size higher to see if it will make a difference the bios is pretty tweakable so far I would give it a 7 and I would change it to a 9 when I get the raid to perform it would score a 10 if they had used ddr333 chipset instead of 266:t

[BipolarBill]

I would give you a 10 if you would just use some punctuation because I get headaches trying to separate sentences from one another due to the lack of a period now and then I'm old and weak in the eyes these days but I hope to win the lottery and buy me some fresh eyes from China hey they're cheap there and are willing to sell them for a bowl of rice I hear. :t

[otheos]

There have a few, both of you: ... , .. ,,,,...

I would really like you to do some proper benchmarking for this RAID0 of yours as Sandra really sucks in storage.

Try ATTO's and HDTach (not free for W2K/Xp) and then we talk :)

[Midknyte]

You just gotta respect a company that is willing to take a chance like that. I don't know if it's gonna fly with consumers, but they sure have guts. Abit has always been right on the leading edge. :D

Here's a review of the IT7 from HardOCP:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Mjkz

[BipolarBill]

As far as RAID 0 goes, this new MSI KT3 Ultra has a Promise UDMA133 "Lite" controller. As an exercise, I connected two W-D 800JB (8MB) drives and installed Win2K. I ran HDTach. While access time (13.3) is pretty good and read/write is strong, the graph line is really ragged and deep. You can see the performance difference between "identical" drives.

All in all, I'm satisfied with it.

[doesitmatter]

your right Otheos, Sandra was way off I download and used atto and found the benchmark to be more inline with what it should be 6mps on the raid(only 2 drives) and a little over 3mps with one drive. I still don't think I am getting the full performance of the ata 133 though seems as though it would be ata 100 drives. I will reformat and set the block size to 64k or higher and see if it improves, Thier set at 32k now thanks for the 411:D ....maybe I'll get a SCSI with a small SCSI drive for the OS and large ata for the files? might be a better idea for performance

[otheos]

Bear in mind that ATA100 and ATA133 have absolutely no performance difference.

Also, could you post your ATTO results (image) as the numbers you mention sound way too low.

Finally, what is that you're after with the RAID0? The block size matters a lot as it dictates where the performance goes. Small size gives hihger STR, large size gives lower latency.

[NOHTO]

* Please note: WinXP does not support ATA133 and therefore UDMA mode 6 will not be shown in Device Manager, even if the current timing mode is ATA133. This is a quote from VIA (http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=66) IDE page on their site. I don't know if you are running XP, but I am sure if you are it would affect them.
Also there is a program called Amset (http://maxtor.com/products/diamondmax/techsupport/technicalprocedures/21007.html) that will help in the performance of the drive. You have to remove the drive from the raid and hook it up to the Ide slot and run the program in Dos Mode I was told, but it isn't supposed to be very difficult
I always use the 64 bit feature on my arrays I believe it is the best for performance.

[NOHTO]

Originally posted by otheos
Bear in mind that ATA100 and ATA133 have absolutely no performance difference.


Unless I am reading this wrong, you might want to re-think that statement.
"This white paper will introduce an increase of data transfer rate via a new industry standard interface, Ultra ATA/133 that clocks data at 133 megabytes per second (MB/s). It surpasses the current parallel ATA interface, Ultra ATA/100 that transfers data at 100MB/s. This increased data transfer speed is designed to meet all of the user needs for performance without adding extra costs. Value and compatibility are achieved by maintaining the current technologies, interfaces and connectors that are already in use today." Taken from Maxtors website (http://www.maxtor.com/products/fastdrive/whitepaper.htm).

[BipolarBill]

In real life, the performance difference between ATA/100 and ATA/133 is negligable - probably due to increased overhead and latency.

[NOHTO]

How did I know that you would be quick to clarify this matter.:) lol
What's up Bill?

[NOHTO]

What about VIA stating that XP doesn't support ATA 133? Any reason for this or is VIA just full of it?

[BipolarBill]

Actually, it's quite possible. In Win2K, you had to hack the registry (http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/781/) to get UDMA66 on the native IDE controller. This may well be the case with WinXP, but as I said, it hardly matters since the performance difference is minimal. All bets are off with Promise and Highpoint RAID controllers because they install UDMA133 along with their drivers. I never had to alter the registry in Win2K because I use Promise controllers in all of my PCs. ;)