Category of small cheap notebooks became very popular and there is no wonder why most of big brands want a piece of cake for themselves. But Asus got all of them off-guard. Because of that we’ve been waiting rather long for Eee’s true rival . We’ve already mentioned MSI’s agility which allowed them again to be first with new product on market. Their trump card wears name Wind and model that InsideHW had tested is MSI Wind U100.
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The long waited AMD platform for notebooks under the name PUMA is finally introduced and InsideHW had a chance to test notebook based on this platform. To all users that have been waiting cheap integrated graphics with good performances, time has come. Intel Centrino was so far “untouchable” in field of portable computers but AMD Puma, by all appearance, got a necessary quality to fight for highest position.
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USB hard disks lately become very popular. This especially goes for 2.5’’models. The reasons for that can be found in their usefulness and practicality. Yet, we are living in times when it is necessary to transfer huge amounts of data from place to place. At first, manufacturers on market fought with larger and larger capacity of these devices. Lately, when capacity stopped being key factor, manufacturers turned to HDD case design. On that field, Prestigio went step ahead of its competitors and launched Prestigio data Safe II Fashion Edition.
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At the end of June, in Spain, we were introduced to a new series of 48xx graphics cards from ATI. We saw then only RV770PRO (4850) but at this moment 4870 (RV770XT) is also available. Even though our sources from AMD didn’t unveil why 4870 wasn’t shown on launching, we assume that some problems with quantities of available GDDR5 memory occurred. Considering that 4850 uses GDDR3 memory, it is no surprise that many retailers had them on stock. ATI 4870 will be sold, in beginning, exclusively with GDDR5 memory (this is the first graphics card that uses this memory) but AMD leaves a possibility that some innovative partner might launch later version that uses GDDR3 memory.
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It’s rare occasion to have on test, on the same month, new generation products from two big rivals (nVIDIA and ATI). This is really good news because ATI had some serious delays with R600 and that is one of reasons why it was so indifferently received on market. ATI realized that now must roll up its sleeves to catch up nVIDIA, because at that point seemed that nVIDIA unreachably moved away.
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This time around we have two motherboards on our lab table. ABIT IP35 Pro Snake and ABIT IP35-E are board intended for use together with Intel's LGA 775 processors. As one can see for himself, the motherboards are based on Intel's newest, the P35 Express chipset which we already told a lot about. Still, it cannot hurt if we mention that these boards support the incoming wave of 45 nm processors with an FSB of 1333 MHz.
Neatly packed boxes contained all necessary cables. Both motherboards sport a blue PCB. We tried to find a flaw in the layout of the IP35 Pro Snake, and failed miserably. The layout of the IP35 Pro Snake is simply perfect. There is more than enough space around the socket, and all connectors are placed in places that provide neat cabling. Even when using a dual-slot graphics card, the first PCI slot is usable. The heatpipe cooling system is great, and the board (meaning Northbridge, Southbridge and voltage unit) remained perfectly cool even when overclocked. Still, for a more extreme overclocking, you will need an active cooling solution (but those are specific situations).
The layout of the IP35-E is much like the former, but the SATA connector is positioned in a different place and one PCI-E x16 is absent. The cooling system is not as efficient as on the other mobo, but is nevertheless more than enough to keep an overclocked system stable. More extreme overclocking isn't really possible as every part of the board must be cooled (no heatpipe), but that is not the board's main use anyway.
As far as IP35 Pro Snake is concerned, all electrolytes are metal-plated, whereas the IP35-E has this kind of solution only around the socket. Generally, this is where they are needed the most, so this move of ABIT's engineers is a smart way to further reduce the price of the final product while maintaining the quality level. Besides the Power and Reset microswitches, the IP35 Pro Snake also has a microswitch for clearing the BIOS on the back panel, so that you don't have to open the case if you wish to clear the BIOS anymore. All in all, the boards look promising, but that is quite irrelevant if not paired with good BIOS, so let's move on to that part of the story.
There is one thing that initially made us very skeptical about these boards is that ABIT's BIOS has always contained a plethora of options, but not the hardware that could be up to par with it. Well, however skeptical we were in the beginning, that disappeared completely afterwards, only to be replaced with delight. Bluntly put, the symbiosis of BIOS and electronics was top-class on these boards. So let's get to the point...
Both motherboards feature Award BIOS, and it can be considered very fast herein. When we say “fast BIOS”, we mean not only a well though-out arrangement of BIOS options, but the speed of reading relevant board parameters (voltages, fan speeds, clocks etc.) as well. The options for fine tuning the system are numerous. We could supply the processor with 1.895 V on the IP35 Pro Snake, and even more on the IP35-E – 1.945 V. Both mobos can provide the memory with 3 V. The maximum settable FSB was 750 MHz on the Pro Snake and 600 MHz on the “E”. Both boards have a 6-step setting for the memory divider (CPU:RAM), varying from 1:1 to 1:2, so no problems whatsoever with fine memory tuning.
The Northbridge of the “E” model can work at an entire 2.05 V, and the Pro Snake's at 1.75 V. Both motherboards reached the limit of our test CPU, 3.6 GHz. Pro Snake also comes with a very interesting piece of software called μGuru. This program monitors all vital system components in Windows and has the possibility of changing the FSB from the operating system directly. The program communicates with the motherboard via a special chip. What made us happy indeed is that all the properties of CPU, RAM, NB etc. (located under the “Default” option in the menu) can be set and changed in real-time! The user can save up to three additional different overclocking profiles (User1, User2, User3), but the BIOS doesn't remember these and they have to be manually loaded from Windows. It doesn't take much time to see how useful this software is.
If we cast aside the fact that Pro Snake has an extra PCI-E x16 slot, two LAN adapters, eSATA connectors, a better layout, FireWire, a larger bundle, a question is imposed: why did ABIT compete with itself by creating IP35-E? Or does the more expensive model justify its price? The answer is – YES! Although both motherboards 4-stage voltage filtering, Pro Snake also has the AD8402 chip which provides better voltage filtering in case of a Quad-Core CPU being installed, and thus a higher FSB. Of course, we tested this immediately.
Our sample Core2Quad Q6600 CPU reached its maximum FSB at 400 MHz on the Pro Snake and only 377 MHz on the IP35-E. Although this may not look like much, the resulting discrepancy between the models is around 200 MHz. Of course, this doesn't affect overclocking of Core2Duo CPUs, where both mobos perform excellently.
ABIT IP35 Pro
ABIT IP35-E
1280x1024
Sandra 2007
Processor
33.198 / 23.068
33.176 / 23.001
Multimedia
198.049 /107.526
198.023 /107.511
Memory
7,771 / 7.758
7,749 / 7.743
Latency
73 ns
73 ns
3DMark06 SM2 / SM3 / CPU
1856 / 2659 / 2682
1846 / 2651 / 2683
Quake4 (MediumQ)
111.3 fps
110 fps
Fear (MediumQ)
74.5 fps
74.1 fps
Pray (MediumQ)
73.9 fps
73.5 fps
Cinebench 9.5
1090
1088
WinRAR 3.60
1.376KB/s
1.346KB/s
Nuclearus 1.0
10875
10870
DivX 6.2.5
150,1 fps
149,1 fps
Testbed: Intel C2D E6400 @ 3.6 GHz, 2x1GB G-Skill DDR2-1066 (2T 5-5-5-15), AMD PowerColor 2600XT, Windows XP Pro SP2
With these two motherboards, it all comes down to user-specific needs. Only then will the final choice present no issue. The ABIT IP35 Pro Snake is a definitive gem with no obvious flaws, and therefore gets an official InsideHW award :-) ABIT IP35-E, as the “weaker” motherboard on test, receives nothing, not because it doesn't deserve an award, but because it was outrun by its own team-mate. Anyhow, these two are a mighty couple of high-quality mobos, and the end-users can only benefit from ABIT's grandiose return.
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