Abit IP35-E

Full Review

I just had the joy of building a gaming system with this nice and fun motherboard. I say that because, unlike most builds, every single thing went smoothly and correctly. Abit boards are usually trouble and hassle free anyways, and the assembly was simple, right out of the box. Other than the need to flash the bios to update it, i am on v14, everything that was needed sat right on the installation disc. Windows XP Pro was hassle free. No need to hit F6 for special drivers. The only thing that was not automated was that the Intel INF chipset utility had to be installed manually. Unlike many mother board makers who use bargain basement parts, this board has all Japanese made capacitors and low profile solid caps at the CPU power circuit. This board uses the same PWM RT8802A IC as the top of the line IP35 Pro, but it is also a hundred bucks cheaper. It has a nice blue board with blue southbridge, northbridge, and MOSFET passive heat sinks that glow nice with the blue LED fan case i used and a blue LED fan on the processor. I got a deal on a new Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor, which is a very stable chip, and i have yet to do any overclocking, but this board and chip are both ready for it. The memory slots are color coded white black for dual channel usage. There is also a molex plug to give additional power to the video card, but this board does not offer SLI dual video cards. There are 4 USB jacks on the back and four USB 2.0 port headers on the left of the front panel header for a grand total of 12 USB ports. The 8-pin/4-pin power plug is located just above the MOSFET heat sink and I used the lower 4 pin plug beause my PSU lacks an 8 pin plug. there are 4 sata plugs onboard. There are three PCI slots, one PCIE x1 slot, and one open slot for a larger PCIE graphic card, one PCIE x 16 slot, and one PCIE x1 slot. Abit included a S/PDIF output and a rear optical out. Onboard audio is 7.1 channel HD audio by Realtek. There is a single Gigabit LAN port using the Marvell 88E8056 PCI Express chip. Bootup time using XP Pro with a 7200 rpm PATA Seagate drive and 2GB RAM was just about 26 seconds
this board is ready for the future. right on the box it says "With the IP35-E you are prepared for the latest 65nm and next generation 45 nm multi-core CPUS." I have not found any major fault with this board after a week of solid testing. I will do a little more before i cut the UPC from the box and send in the rebate. If the board blows, then with no UPC, no return!! This can be found for around $70 after a rebate, and Abit handles the rebates in house, and are very quick. I am going to get another one of these while they are on sale. this is a great quality board with great tech support if you do need it. Get this board while it is on sale at many places.