Abit AT7 Max2 (VIA KT400) Motherboard Review
Layout
The board Abit At7-MAX2 looks both out of the ordinary and very
impressive: black textolyte, silvery chipset cooler and a huge RAID
chip.
The board is rather large in dimensions - 30x24.5cm, however,
fitting it inside the case was a breeze. But the cooler must be put on
before the board's installation, since the processor socket is very
close to the edge.
If we take a closer look at the processor socket, we can see
there's enough space around it for installing massive coolers. That's
good but the missing protection under the socket teeth is a slight
flaw.
the socket latch made of plastic!
Regarding the support for integrated thermal sensors of Athlon
XP processors, it's there.
Now look at the power connectors - they are two. The main
connector is placed under the processor socket, but the additional one,
4-pin, is near the AGP slot. This is the second time the additional
power connector appears on boards for AMD processors (there are as many
as 3 of them on the Shuttle AK37GTR board).
It's pleasant to observe the thorough approach in the way the
board's power is arranged. Certainly, the high quality of power supply
is of paramount importance to the overclocker's board. The power
consumed by the processor can be as high as 80W (even 90-100 W for
heavily overclocked processors).
The chipset's northbridge is fitted where it usually should be
and is cooled by a small aluminum cooler whose design is very similar
to that of Tt Crystal ORB.
Between the chipset and the power socket there is a couple of
connectors for plugging in fans (FAN1 ? FAN2). Totally, there are 4
such connectors on the AT7 MAX2 board: the FAN3 is placed in the
board's corner, near the additional IDE connectors, with the FAN4 near
the board's rear panel.
Under the northbridge there are 4 slots for memory modules.
The maximum memory capacity is 2GB for DDR333/DDR400 and 3.5GB
for DDR200/DDR266. The presence of voltage on the memory is signaled by
the LED near the bottom left corner of the board (near the FAN3).
Near the memory slots there are two connectors of the
integrated IDE controllers. They are of the same color, but the
captions near them are large enough. On the whole, the quality of
marking on the AT7-MAX2 board is very good - all the captions are
easily visible, even when the board is inside the tight case.
On the board there is also a connector for plugging in a
floppy drive. The latter was the most disappointing. If the board is
supposed to be revolutionary, the changes must be radical. Removing the
COM, LPT connectors is not a problem, but devising a substitute for the
floppy drive is quite a bigger task.
On to the AGP slot.
Unlike the AT7 (KT333) board, the slot is equipped with a latch for
fixing a video card firmly in place. Besides, inside the slot a
partition key has been added to prevent installation of the older 3.3V
video cards (reminding you that the KT400 chipset supports only 1.5V
video cards of the AGP 4X/8X standard).
Now look at the expansivity options.
As compared to the AT7 (KT333) board the board's design has
been essentially revised. First, instead of 3 PCI slots there are as
many as 5 on our board under review.
Secondly, instead of 4 additional IDE connectors there are
only two of them on the AT7-MAX2 board are left. On the other hand,
support for SerialATA has come up. The respective connectors are close
to the RAID controller.
A few words about the RAID. There is a HighPoint HPT374 RAID chip on
the AT7-MAX2 board. The last digit stands for the maximum number of
channels (e.g. the single-channel RAID controller chip HPT371 on the
board DFI AD76).
the chip is of absolutely indecent dimensions :)
Therefore, we now can plug in up to 4 additional IDE devices,
with a couple more devices can be plugged via the SerialATA interface.
As a result, the user can create RAID arrays of 0, 1 and 0+1 levels.
From the disk subsystem we now turn to the options for
plugging in additional devices. The At7-MAX2 board offers support for
the two most popular serial buses: USB2.0 and IEEE-1394 (Firewire). At
the number of USB ports our board in question is an absolute champion,
it offers as many as 10 of them: six on the rear panel and 4 are
plugged with brackets (the board comes bundled with only 1 bracket
having 2 ports). But there are fewer Firewire ports - only 3 (2 on the
rear panel).
Remember that the VT8235 northbridge supports only six USB2.0
ports. Therefore, to increase the number of ports, Abit engineers had
to fit an additional chip,(VT6202).
And to enable support for the Firewire bus, a TSB43AB23
controller manufactured by Texas Instruments was installed on the
At7-MAX2 motherboard.
And lastly, there is a 6-channel integrated audio built on the
ALC650 chip. Besides, a VIA VT6103 LAN controller is integrated on the
board.
Now it's time we looked at the rear panel of the board:
An absolutely unusual thing - neither COM, nor LPT ports (let
alone the GAME port :) are there.
Following the tradition, I am bringing in the schematic
drawing of the motherboard.
The number of jumpers has been cut down to the minimum, in the
Abit tradition. One of them is used for clearing the CMOS (CCMOS1 -
near the battery cell), with another, CROM, used for controlling the
S2K bus (a bus between the processor and northbridge). If the jumper is
set to 1-2 (by default), the parameter "Fast Command Decode" becomes
accessible and its variation allows increasing the system performance a
bit.
A couple of things worth noting: first, the battery cell is
fitted in a quite smart way - vertically (I observed such a technical
trick on Intel motherboards).
Secondly, the CMOS jumper has a plastic tail to facilitate
switching (something similar we saw on Chaintech motherboards).
Close to the battery cell there is also a chip responsible for
the I/O and system monitoring - Winbond W83697HF. There is also a BIOS
chip fitted in the cradle.
Now on to the BIOS description. The BIOS of Abit AT7 Max2 is
based on Award BIOS v6.00PG.
The most interesting section is that to do with memory
tweaking. Following the Abit tradition, the list of parameters is so
big that does not fit on the screen.
There are also the standard settings like CAS Latency, Bank
Interleave and DRAM Command Rate. There are much finer settings:
Active(Trp), Active to precharge(Tras) and Active to CMD(Trcd). There
is an interesting parameter, "Enhance DRAM Performance", which allows
improving the memory subsystem performance by a certain means.
Of special interest is the CAS Latency parameter which can
take values between 1.5 and 3.
The value 5T is missing in the parameter "Active to
precharge(Tras).
The memory speed selection is standard for KT400-based boards:
for FSB<166 MHz, accessible values are 2.0 (DDR266), 2.5
(DDR333) and 3.0 (DDR400). But for FSB = 166 MHz and higher, only the
synchronous mode is accessible, i.e. the multiplier = 2.0.
Among the BIOS settings, there is a parameter responsible for
selecting the mode at which the bus between the south and north bridges
of the chipset (V-Link 8X) should run.
Finally, the system monitoring section.
A wide selection of sensors is available to the user. For
instance, the processor temperature is traced with both external and
internal thermal sensors. So there is a quite curious information
regarding the air differential temperature between the socket and the
core. Some testers say the Abit AT7 MAX2 has a hardware protection
against overheat. That is, in case the cooler is removed from the
running system the board should power-off and the processor won't burn
down. Anyway, I didn't dare verify this information on my own processor
:).
Abit dubbed this technology as CPU H.T.P (CPU Hardware Thermal
Protection). We saw something similar on Asus, Soltek and
Fujitsu-Siemens motherboards. By the way, similar technology is used in
Abit KD7 (KT400) and NF7-S (nForce2) motherboards.
The user is also shown information on the rotational speeds of
the two (of four) fans; all the voltages (including the battery cell
voltage) are displayed.
You can also define values of the processor's critical
temperature upon reaching which the system will power-off and a warning
beep will sound.
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