ABIT IP35-E - What you get
(Page 2 of 4 )
What you get
Abit gives you nothing but the basics for this board. You get 2 SATA cables, an ATA cable, a floppy cable, back panel, instructional books and of course the board. For the price of this board, you shouldn't expect any more. One thing worth noting is that Abit includes a little sticker with the different jumpers' locations, which makes it a lot easier than paging through a multilingual book. What you pay for is the motherboard so we will look at this more in-depth.
Let's start with the socket area first. The good perk here is that the area around the socket is very clean. This is good for people who will put bigger coolers on, which might interfere with the motherboard if this area is too crowded. We do have a little heatsink for the power phase, but it doesn't get hot and doesn't need anything else to help cool it.
As we move to the memory slots we don't see anything that special. We run into the ATX power connector. This connector is often placed in odd places and creates a mess inside your case. The IP35-E has a very good location and shouldn't pose any problems.
As we go down the board, we find all of our ports. Under that blue heatsink is the Intel ICH9 southbridge. We have 4 SATA ports as well as 1 IDE connector and one floppy disk drive connector. I would have preferred 2 IDE, but this is an issue with the southbridge and not Abit. I guess the world is turning and SATA is finally taking over the market. It was bound to happen, but we still need the good old floppy.
One thing I didn't notice until later in writing this review is the USB headers. Normally you get a few of them, but on this board you get 4 of them. I'm guessing to help cut costs, Abit left the headers and did not make them full USB ports.
Next we happen upon the PCI slots. We have one PCI-Express 16x slot used for graphics cards, 2 PCI-Express 1x slots and 3 PCI slots. There is plenty of space for even the biggest graphic card coolers out there. There is a nice mix of PCI and PCI-Express slots for the many add-on cards that you may have or might buy in the future.
Under this blue heatsink we have the P35 chipset. This is one of Intel's new chipsets. This one supports the new 45nm Penryn processors. Along with that, it offers the ability to reach high FSB. It also has the ability to support DDR3. DDR3 is still really expensive, so many of the boards so far have been DDR2 versions. But a few DDR3 boards have cropped up. Being a cheap P35 board, this board supports DDR2. I am very excited to test this new chipset out. During testing I did notice that it heated up fairly quickly. I put a fan over the chipset cooler and also the memory and all was well again.
Finally we have the back I/O ports. On top we have the nearly obsolete PS2 ports for your mouse and keyboard. Next we have our sound. We have an optical out as well as the standard audio ports you would be able to find on most motherboards. Rounding it out is a network port and 4 USB. I would have liked to see at least 6 USB, but 4 will do and this is a budget board, so there had to be cutbacks somewhere. And speaking of cutbacks, they cut the 1394 aka Firewire port. I would have liked to see one of these on the back, but in all honesty, I stopped using Firewire when I upgraded my third generation iPod to the fifth, so I have no need for it right now.
One thing that I miss from my previous Abit motherboard is their uGuru application. This was an application that allowed users to overclock their motherboards via software within Windows. There are other programs out there that will do the same thing as uGuru. I haven't been able to get them to work with this board however. I'm not sure how much it would have cost to put the uGuru function into the board, but I would have paid a few extra dollars for it.
Next: BIOS/Overclocking >>
More Motherboards Articles
More By jkabaseball
| Recommended by Dev Hardware |
|---|
|
