Abit IP35 Pro Off Limit
As always Abit will be releasing various boards based on a single chipset which cover various price points. The board we are looking at today is the one which sits at the top of their range, the IP35 Pro Off Limits. The PRO-OL packaging isn’t as impressive as Gigabyte’s however does a good job of giving us information on the major features with some bullet points and logos on the front and various blurbs on the rear. Points Abit have chosen to highlight are CPU support, the use of Japanese Solid State Capacitors (2 Separate mentions on the front!) and silent cooling.
Inside the IP35 box are IDE, floppy and SATA cables as well as a bracket for 2 extra USB and a single fire wire port. The Manuals provided by Abit are up to their usual standard with no noticeable mistakes, the bundled CD contains the drivers required for XP and Vista as well as Abit's monitoring software.
Abit have taken a discrete approach to the design of their board with black and blue styling. As with the other boards being tested today this is a P35/ICH9R combo with support for DDR2-1066 and 1333FSB CPU’s. The current minimum supported processors are Pentium D’s based on the 800FSB however this may be expanded to 533FSB in the future. 7.1 Audio is present here however also features a nice little extra, a 3pin connector on the motherboard which can be connected to graphics cards which support HDMI audio out, a very future proof decision by Abit. The main external connectors come in the form of Analogue and Digital audio, four USB 2.0, dual GB-LAN and twin eSATA connectors. It’s also great to see the external clear CMOS switch present on the IP35 Pro.
As well as looking great the IP35 Pro has a very sensible side to its design. There are various niceties such as the onboard power and reset buttons and status LED display, however it is the placement and direction of the SATA (6xSATA 2) and IDE connectors which are most useful to the enthusiast. On both they are placed so as to point out to the side of the PCB rather than up. The benefit of this design is that they do not interfere with larger graphics cards. We’ve lost count of the times recently when boards have featured an array of driver connectors, however half are useless if high end Nvidia 7/8 series or AMD 1k/2k series cards are installed. Looking at the card connectors we can see that Abit clearly don’t yet believe in PCIe 1x products and there is in fact only one such connector on this board, which also features two 16x PCIe and 3 PCI slots. The silver lining is that the single 1x slot is above where the main Graphics card will be installed and so will always be accessible.
Cooling on the Abit board is all copper based. The Southbridge, Northbridge and various Mosfet’s are all cooled and there is sufficient room around the CPU socket to accommodate oversized coolers.
