This motherboard has a POST diagnostics display, which allows you to know thru a 2-digit code what is wrong if your computer doesn’t turn on.

click to enlarge
Figure 4: POST diagnostics display.

On Figure 4 you can also see that this motherboard has on-board reset and power switches, which are quite handy. On this same picture you can see the ìGuru chip (read it as “microguru”), a monitoring chip designed by Abit and manufactured by Winbond that provides several extra temperature and fan monitoring functionalities. On Figure 4 you can also see the passive heatsink used on the south bridge chip.

On this motherboard Abit used only solid aluminum capacitors, even the smaller ones – and not only the ones used on the voltage regulator circuit like some manufacturers are doing these days. Using this kind of capacitors prevent the capacitor leakage problem. On the other hand Abit could have used ferrite coils instead of iron coils on the voltage regulator circuit.

click to enlarge
Figure 5: Solid aluminum capacitors.

On Figure 5 you can also see the passive heatsink that is used on top of the MOSFET transistors from the voltage regulator circuit.

On this picture you can also see that this motherboard uses an EPS12V connector, however according to the manual you can use a regular ATX12V on this connector (in this case four pins will be left over). Talking about power, this motherboard has another power connector using a regular peripheral power plug, which needs to be used if you install a second video card on this product.

On Figure 6 you can see all cables and adaptors that come with this motherboard.

click to enlarge
Figure 6: Motherboard accessories.

Before going further you need to know something really important regarding our review methodology. We always check to see if the external bus is set to the right clock rate, which in our case is 266 MHz, since we were using a Core 2 Duo E6700 processor. Some motherboards come with a small overclock by default, making them to perform better on reviews than competing products where the manufacturer used the official clock rate. In cases like this, we reduce the clock to the correct clock rate in order to make the comparison fair. Otherwise we would need to configure the competing products with the same overclocking to make the comparison correct.

This is the case of this model from Abit. When we set its clock configuration to “auto”, it automatically sets the external bus at 272 MHz and not at 266 MHz, as you can see on Figure 7. This made our CPU to run at 2.72 MHz and not at 2.66 MHz and our memories at 816 MHz and 1,088 MHz not at 800 MHz or 1,066 MHz, respectively.

For the average user this means an extra performance, which is always desirable. However, since we were making comparisons between Abit IP35 Pro and competing products it was unfair to leave it configured this way, so we manually set the FSB to 266 MHz.

click to enlarge
Figure 7: Abit IP35 Pro sets a small overclock automatically.

So you may find reviews around the web claiming that Abit IP35 Pro is the fastest socket 775 motherboard around, but their methodology is flawed, as they are comparing an overclocked system to systems with no overclocking.