ABIT IT5H HX Socket-7 Board

The Test

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

Test Configuration

As you can see from the benchmark results, the IT5H is extremely fast when it comes to performance especially with the AMD K6 processor. I should state this now to avoid any confusion, do not compare these Winstone scores to the HX83's scores in its review since those scores were taken using the ATI 3D Xpression+ which is receives slower Winstone results than the Matrox Millennium. I will have a head to head comparison of the IT5H and HX83 tomorrow for those of you that wish to compare the two boards.

I'm not exactly sure why the IT5H kept on failing the high end tests, but nevertheless the performance is astonishing. I'll try rerunning some of the High End tests when I get some more time to see if I can get them to complete successfully.

The Final Decision

Should you buy this board? YES!!!! ABIT has showed me that they can produce a SoftMenu enabled board with hardly any problems as well as tremendous performance qualities. If you hate settings jumpers and simply love performance, run out and grab this board now! Then you'll be able to really tweak, have you ever tried running your CPU at 225MHz for one application then 208MHz for a game? Well, with the IT5H you can. It is especially useful if you have a peripheral which you use some of the time that doesn't work at a higher bus speeds (i.e. Parallel Port ZIP Drive), so you can reset your bus speed with the flip of a reset switch.