The layout
For a moment, Abit had a great thing going with the orange color scheme of its BH7 motherboard. The reddish-orange board color was bold, attractive, and surprisingly unique among a landscape of multicolored motherboards. Unfortunately, Abit has abandoned the reddish-orange dye for the IC7-G and gone with a rather hideous shade of brown. As if that weren't enough, Abit peppers the IC7-G with an array of blue, turquoise, and purple components that even I know clash with the brown backdrop.

I don't have a case window, and I'm not the type to choose PC components based on cosmetic appearance, but the IC7-G doesn't need to be this ugly. Dressing up a high-end Canterwood board in brown and turquoise is about as wrong as applying the same color scheme to a Porsche.

For the number of slots, chips, and components present on the board, the IC7-G's layout is actually quite spacious. The board's main power plug is a little farther down the board than I'd like to see, but at least the auxiliary plug is near the top edge and away from the socket.

Keeping power cords away from the IC7-G's relatively bare socket area leaves plenty of room for larger passive heat sinks. Honestly, it's rare that a Socket 478 motherboard doesn't have loads of room for enormous heat sinks, a testament to Intel's intelligent socket guidelines that demand plenty of clearance.

Next to the CPU socket are the IC7-G's paired, dual-channel DIMM slots. As with all dual channel-memory designs, DIMMs should be installed in pairs in the IC7-G for optimal performance. Two pairs of DIMM slots has become pretty standard for Canterwood-based motherboards, though it's worth noting Gigabyte offers a Canterwood board with three pairs of DIMM slots.

Adding DIMMs to the IC7-G is a snap because, for once, there's plenty of room between the board's AGP slot and the DIMM retention tabs. Memory modules can be swapped in and out with ease, even when there's a graphics card installed. There's plenty of clearance behind the board's AGP Pro slot for monsters like NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4600 and GeForce FX 5800 Ultra.

Abit's inclusion of an AGP Pro slot on the IC7-G should attract graphics professionals looking to run workstation-class graphics cards, but it does sacrifice the board's suitability for LAN gaming a little. The AGP Pro slot doesn't have a retention mechanism to hold standard AGP cards in place, which could allow a graphics card to become unseated while a system's in transit.

The IC7-G has five 32-bit, 33MHz PCI slots, just like nearly every other single-processor motherboard out there. PCI-X support would be nice to see for the workstation crowd, but consumers will have to trade up to one of the many Xeon chipsets to gain access to a 64-bit, 133MHz PCI-X bus.

Abit loads up the IC7-G's port cluster with all sorts of goodies, including a full complement of analog and digital audio I/O ports that do away with inconvenient port sharing. PS/2, serial, and parallel ports also grace the backplane, along with Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire, and four USB 2.0 ports. More USB and Firewire ports are available via a PCI expansion header.