Introduction
ABIT IT7-MAX2 Motherboard Review
Introduction
Unless you've been living under a non-technological rock, you'll probably know the commotion that ABIT's initial MAX series of motherboards caused on their announcement and subsequent production. Two series of MAX 'boards were announced, the IT7 and AT7 for Intel Pentium 4 and AMD's socket A CPUs respectively.
Their raison d'etre seemed to lie in providing the end-user with hither-to unseen levels of feature integration without sacrificing pure performance. High-speed peripheral standards had been gaining momentum of late, so we saw the MAX motherboards jam-packed with USB2.0 and Firewire (1394a) ports, even 4-channel IDE hardware RAID was provided by the capable Highpoint HPT374 chipset.
One only has a pre-defined amount of 'board space to work with, so routing all these extra ports, and perhaps with a view to rid the motherboard world of the archaic legacy ports, ABIT saw fit to rid the MAX motherboards of the classic PS/2 and COM ports. From a purely theoretical point of view, the change seemed much needed. After all, motherboard design was largely unchanged in years. From a practical viewpoint, however, the change was greeted with a mute response from the hardware community. Many of us still had the need to use these ports, whether they be for an external modem, printer, or a number of older devices.
Four months ago, I reviewed the ABIT IT7-MAX here I found it refreshing and exciting in a homogenous motherboard world. Even now, subjectively speaking, it's safe to say that it's considered to be amongst the best S478 DDR motherboards available. At its launch, the IT7-MAX had the majority of cutting-edge peripheral support embedded on its PCB. The interim four months have seen a couple of new technologies rear their heads. So, it was rather inevitable that we would see a seasonal update of the MAX lineup.
Announced early last month, the MAX2 series were that seasonal update. ABIT sent due notice that their new Socket 478 flagship motherboard was ready to ship. Although the i845E chipset remains unchanged, there have been a few important changes in the transition from MAX to MAX2. Find out exactly what they are and how they impact upon this new motherboard.
Let's first look at the specifications in detail. This should provide us with the insight we need.
