Alongside the big players like MSI and ASUS stands ABIT, not a regular in our review but their products have not disappointed us so far. While MSI and ASUS utilised DDR3 technology, ABIT decided to go with good old DDR2 technology instead. Let’s see how this works out.
Unlike ASUS’s ROG boards, you won’t see a whole lot of accessories as you would expect out of an enthusiast board. Rather, ABIT includes what is necessary in order to lower down the cost; even hardcore veterans want to save money whenever they can. Apart from SATA cables, a floppy and IDE cable, we didn’t really find anything else.
The first thing we noticed was, of course, the silent dual-pipe heatsink that covered quite a bit of the PCB (printed circuit board). A copper high-fin heatsink sits on top the northbridge, which extends to another copper fin block as well as a passive heatsink that cools the southbridge. There is a seperate heatsink over the Digital PWM (pulse-width modulation) which dissipates the heat out through the back panel. The area around the CPU socket is quite spacious, allowing for various types of CPU coolers to be used. The DIMM slots are spaced out quite well, so that the RAM can be pulled out even if a long graphics card is used. The IDE and SATA ports are facing outwards, which is always welcoming. To aid overclockers, an LED as well as a power and reset button are situated among the components for safety measures. The clear CMOS button is located at the back also for this purpose. Three PCIe x16 slots are available, though one of them (the black one) only runs at x4 speed. We like the idea that they placed the x1 slot above as most other boards face the recurring issue of it being obstructed by bigger graphics cards.
With the X38 chipset, the mobo supports an FSB speed of 1,600MHz as well as the PCI Express 2.0 generation two. Gamers would be able to go CrossFire at x16 on two cards at the same time.
We ran PCMark on the board to see if the use of DDR2 made any difference to the scores. For CPU, the board scored 7,671, which was higher than the other X38 boards tested this month (this could be because of the 1,600MHz FSB). As for memory, its score of 5,919 was just a little lower than the rest. Graphics obtained 11,675 while the HDD test achieved 5,491. PCMark awarded it an 8,108.
Judging from the scores, we can assume that ABIT knew that including DDR3 wasn’t going to boost overall performance significantly, so why incur extra costs? All in all, the IX38 QuadGT is one heck of a board in terms of design, usability and performance. If you want to try and save as much as you can but still want to get an enthusiast board, you might want to check this one out.
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