Abit introduces IP35 'Bearlake' mobos

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 21st May 2007

We first saw Abit's IP35 series motherboards at CeBit, but the company has now formally announced them.

Abit has announced its newest selection of motherboards today, which are based around Intel's P35 Bearlake chipset.

The company says that its IP35 series have been engineered for Intel's LGA775 multi-core CPUs, with support for the upcoming 45nm processors and front side bus speeds of up to 1333MHz. There's currently no support for DDR3 memory, but we expect those boards to follow later when DDR3 is more prevalent in the market.

The IP35 Pro - the flagship motherboard in the series - includes Abit's µGuru technology, which gives the user extensive hardware monitoring and control. There's also an external CMOS reset switch on the board's rear I/O panel.

On top of this, there are on-board power and reset switches, two eSATA ports, 8-channel high-definition audio, Gigabit LAN, Firewire and dual PCI-Express x16 slots, with the second only supporting an X4 link width.

In addition to the IP35 Pro, there are two more affordable boards in Abit's IP35 series. The IP35 has most of the features that come with the Pro, but it's missing µGuru, eSATA, one of the PCI-Express x16 slots and also doesn't include 100% solid state capacitors. Even lower down the scale is the IP35-E, which also drops Firewire, two of the SATA ports, RAID functionality and the heatpipe cooling solution is also removed too.

We're told that pricing should be in line with Abit's current P965 motherboards (although maybe slightly higher) and we can expect them to be available on the market soon. Hopefully, we'll have one in the labs before long for Richard to ~~abuse~~ put through its paces.

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