Last summer we posted our review of abit IP35 Pro mainboard that received our prestigious Editor’s Choice award.

We are not going to correct anything in that review, and we really don’t have to, because abit IP35 Pro mainboard is a true success. It is so good that we are still using it within our test platform for LGA 775 processors overclocking. Other mainboards in Intel P35 Express, new mainboards on Intel X38 Express as well as even newer mainboards on Intel X48 Express couldn’t oust abit IP35 Pro from this position. However, a lot of time has passed since then and we did find a few drawbacks in the remarkable abit IP35 Pro, so our opinion about it has obviously changed reflecting the current situation.

Speaking of drawbacks, we can recall a few not very significant ones that nevertheless cause certain problems during the work with this mainboard. For example, we couldn’t find the key that would launch the boot-up menu. abit IP35 Pro doesn’t allow changing the boot-up device “on the fly”, like many other mainboards. You have to access the BIOS Setup, change the device order save the settings and reboot. A real trifle, isn’t it? Yes it is, but it is an inconvenience.

There are some more serious drawbacks: abit IP35 Pro is not as flexible with the memory, as some of its competitors. Even some of the budget mainboards offer more memory dividers than abit IP35 Pro. Moreover, ASUS, DFI and Gigabyte mainboards also can change Performance Level parameter directly, and abit IP35 Pro cannot, though this parameter does have big influence on the general system performance. Of course, mainboards for office PCs will not require any of these features, but a high-performance overclocker mainboard got to have them.

However, the prestige of abit IP35 pro suffered the biggest blow from the actual manufacturer. Namely from their inertness. The BIOS version that supports new fractional clock frequency multipliers for 45nm CPUs dates back only to second half of March 2008. Until that time abit IP35 Pro owners had to put up with the fact that the clock frequency of their Wolfdale and Yorkfield processors was below the nominal values in case of fractional multipliers and that the power-saving technologies didn’t work. According to the official specs, abit IP35 Pro did support 45nm CPUs, although in reality this support was implemented only partially. This is when you start thinking if going with an abit mainboard is such a good idea, considering the manufacturer will leave you on your own for a long while (thank god not forever) without the necessary support.

There is no excuse for this attitude to users, but there might be a reasonable explanation. It turned out that abit IP35 mainboard family that used to include only three models – the top IP35 Pro, mainstream IP35 and budget IP35-E – has been expanded. They introduced a new flagship mainboard on Intel P35 Express chipset – abit IP35 Pro XE.

As you can easily see, abit IP35 Pro XE mainboard looks exactly like the IP35 Pro, differing only by the color of the chipset cooling system. However, the new mainboard is already claimed to support CPUs with 1600MHz FSB, while IP35 Pro officially supported only FSB 1333, which means that the new mainboard has more dividers available. It should also support fractional processor clock multipliers by default. So, looks like the developers were busy with the new abit IP35 Pro XE, having put the older IP35 Pro aside until better times.

Note: since both mainboards look the same, we reflashed the abit IP35 Pro XE BIOS onto our abit IP35 Pro. This experiment failed. The BIOS reflashed alright, we got new memory dividers, but they didn’t work. Moreover, the board didn’t behave that confident anymore, sow e returned to the latest BIOS version 1.6 at the time of the tests.

However, abit IP35 mainboard family expanded not only at the top, but also at the bottom. Namely they launched an even simpler mainboard than abit IP35-E – IP35P. so, our today’s article will be devoted to this particular product.