Layout and Features I
The first obvious attention-grabbing change is the revised colour. Gone is the generic light brown colour, to be replaced with a dark shade that contrasts better with the on-board peripherals. The general layout is nigh-on identical to the original IT7-MAX. This is no bad thing, however.
Starting from top to bottom. let's explore this motherboard in a little greater detail. The position of both the standard 21-pin and 12v 4-pin power connectors is good. They're high enough up the motherboard to negate any possible airflow issues arising from airflow disturbance caused by trailing wires. The one problem with the main ATX power connector is that once the PSU's connector is inserted, it becomes difficult to access system RAM, although you shouldn't need to do that too many times.
This rotated view of the CPU socket shows that there is ample room to mount a larger cooler should the need arise. I'm glad that ABIT have decided to use metal levers as opposed to the plastic ones used on the IT7-MAX. For those interested in pushing their systems to the limit, the HIP6301 voltage regulator is still very awkwardly placed underneath the retention bracket. Getting to pin 7 isn't as easy as it should be.
The 3 DDR DIMM slots can take a maximum of 2GB of system memory. One idiosyncrasy of the i845E chipset is that you can only use 2 single-sided DIMMS in slots 2 and 3 if all slots are to populated, hence pushing you down to 2GB of possible memory. The main IDE and floppy connectors are located in a decent location. Close to the drives they will service.
We see that 4 32-bit PCI slots are provided. The level of feature integration on this motherboard really precludes the need for more than the specified amount.
