Abit have a curious position in the motherboard industry. There's little doubt that they are one of the most celebrated motherboard manufacturers by enthusiasts, gamers and knowledgeable purchases, but whilst this may sound like a good thing, it can result in problems with the increasingly bland OEMs. So with Intel's 865PE chipset already well known for being a value chipset with some bite, it seems the perfect showcase for Abit to harness their overclocking prowess and still produce something that will appeal to the mainstream market. As you'll find out after this two part review the IS7-G not only harnesses the 865PE, it pushes it to the limit. Before we look a the IS7-G, lets just take a minute to talk about the background surrounding the 865PE chipset from Intel. Known as Springdale, it's bigger brother, the 875P (or Canterwood) was launched to much acclaim until it was known that the 865PE still had many of the performance vectors that were found in it's bigger brother. So why did Intel bother in launching a similarly performing chipset you may ask.
The 875P is clearly aimed at the high-end enthusiast/low to mid range workstation market. Motherboards initially were priced to reflect this, with boards from Asus, Abit and Gigabyte retailing for just under £200. It features a host of new technologies that were never seen before on the Pentium 4 platform. Technologies such as dual channel DDR RAM, Communications Streaming Architecture (CSA), Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) and DDR 400 were all supported.
To compliment the new Northbridge came a new Southbridge from Intel, the ICH5. This featured for the first time native Serial ATA support, and in the case of the ICH5R, Serial ATA RAID. Other technologies like 6-channel sound and 8 USB 2.0 channels were also present.
And to cap it all off, new 800MHz FSB capable CPUs were also launched on the same day. This all added up to make for a very successful launch for Intel. Not only was performance higher than ever before, their great rival, AMD had no answer. The desktop performance crown was with Intel and no one was questioning it. However not everyone will want to spend £200 on a motherboard, £300+ on a CPU and £150 for two sticks of quality DDR 400 RAM. Something had to fill the gap that was the mainstream market.
Enter the 865 chipset. It comes in three fruity flavours 865P, 865G and 865PE. We'll concentrate on the 865PE, but the whole range of 865 chipsets is chiefly aimed at the mainstream end of the market. The mainstream sector is the most important and whilst it doesn't hold the same prestige as the high-end, it is the mainstream accounts for the vast majority of sales and therefore income for most manufacturers in all aspects of computer manufacture, be it motherboards, video cards or processors. So getting the balance of performance and cost right is key.
The 865PE chipset, when initially announced was greeted with a mixed reception. Not due to prior knowledge of it's features or performance but due to the scepticism that since it was aimed at the mainstream market, the 865 would be far too cut down for any real use. As we found on the day of launch this was far from the case, in fact it was completely different scenario. The 865PE based motherboards whilst being a good 3-5% behind most 875P motherboards was over 35% cheaper. It meant that many editors were recommending the 865PE over the 875P even for enthusiasts. Starting around the 'DIMM side' of the motherboard we find things are generally well done, with the 24-pin ATX power connector on one side of the board. Although not quite skirting the edge of the PCB, and shadowing the floppy drive connector it's an adequate placement. We also see the Winbond hardware-monitoring chip along with the battery. Interestingly we find the infra-red connector here, and whilst the corresponding header isn't supplied, this isn't the optimal position since any cables would have to stretch right across the motherboard.
The DIMM sockets are bunched in pairs, as is the common with motherboards supporting dual channel DDR SDRAM. The two pairs are well separated although each DIMM socket in that pair are a little too close together for our liking. It doesn't hurt to have a little gap between them, especially when you have popular modules sporting heat-spreaders. Our other major gripe in this area is the close proximity of the AGP slot to the DIMM sockets. In almost all cases you will have to fit the RAM before the video card. The distance between the CPU heatsink mount and the first DIMM socket is more than adequate. In that gap we find the fan header for the CPU - on the right side of the CPU and not too close to the edge. | 
