Bundle and presentation
As things currently stand, the IT7-MAX2 v2.0 is ABIT's top-of-the-line socket 478 motherboard. With that being the case, and charging a premium price due to its status, what exactly do you receive ?
The standard see-through ABIT box makes a reappearance alongside a rather large advert for their Serillel SATA RAID connection, more on that later.
Apart from the motherboard itself, you are provided with a host of extras. Although we have 6 USB2.0 ports included on the backplane, we also receive a bracket giving us 8 usable ports in total (out of a possible 10). ABIT also provide their own colour-coded IDE cables and ties, a nice touch.
ABIT's included Serillel adapter is an amalgamation of two hard drive technologies. The MAX2 v2 sports 4-channel IDE RAID courtesy of 2 standard IDE ports and 2 S-ATA (serial ATA) ports. The latter use a thinner cable connection that isn't compatible with IDE in the traditional sense. ABIT bundled adapter allows you to use IDE drives with the S-ATA ports via the method depicted above.
It all works rather elegantly. The grey S-ATA cable plugs into one of the two S-ATA ports and functions just like a standard ATA133 cable. There's no real difference in performance when using either a standard IDE cable or the S-ATA connection via the adapter. It would have been nice to have 2 of these adapters because unlike IDE cables, you cannot attach two drives on one cable.
