Fully integrated
As we saw with the spec sheet, the AT7 MAX integrates a wealth of peripherals right onto the PCB. While chips populate the PCB, their ports grace the motherboard's backplane.

The oddest-looking backplane full of ports that I've ever seen...

... and its matching case panel

Thanks to the removal of legacy ports, all the essentials—sound, networking, Firewire, and USB—can be accessed without adding additional headers or PCI cards. Abit also offers a 'MediaXP' front bay panel to move some of these ports to a more accessible location at the front of the case, something I've been begging for for years.

The AT7 gets six USB 1.1 ports from the south bridge controller of the VIA KT333 chipset and also throws in a VIA VT6202 USB 2.0 chip and splits the four USB 2.0 ports between the backplane and a PCI header for your high-bandwidth peripherals. Firewire comes courtesy of Texas Instruments, and Realtek provides the 10/100 Ethernet.

Realtek's ALC650 chip provides the AT7's on-board six-channel audio. With support for 5.1 speaker configurations, it's an impressive integrated sound offering, complete with a 24-bit optical S/PDIF output to maximize sound quality. Through my Philips 4.1 surround speakers, the Realtek sounds just as good as an SBLive! card.

More IDE than you can...
Abit continues to push the limits of on board IDE RAID. In addition to the KT333 chipset's two ATA/133 ports, the AT7 has an additional four ATA/133 RAID ports via Highpoint's 374 controller. In total, you can hook up a whopping 12 IDE devices to the AT7, and perhaps more importantly, six devices can play without having to share an IDE channel.

The Highpoint 374 and, count 'em, four IDE RAID ports

With Highpoint's 374 chip on board, you can bask in the glory of 8-drive RAID 0, 1, or 0+1. This may be as good as it gets for on-board IDE RAID, but I can't help but dream of a day when on-board IDE RAID will go as far as RAID 5.

The inclusion of a floppy connector doesn't really fit Abit's reduced legacy agenda, but the decision was a conscious one on their part. The industry has yet to agree on a replacement for the obsolete floppy disk, and while some of us get by just fine with only CD-Rs, it's not the most elegant solution.

Chips galore
The AT7 is based on VIA's KT333 chipset, currently the fastest Socket A platform on the market.

Quite simply a sad thermal compound application

Unfortunately, Abit's thermal compound application on the KT333 north bridge is horrid. The north bridge may not get hot enough for this fact to matter, but if that's the case, why bother with thermal compound at all? It might not be a big deal performance wise, but this sloppiness detracts froms the attention to detail normally seen on Abit products.

Does VIA have its PCI latency issues licked?

We've been quite impressed with VIA's KT333 platform. However, it's not without its problems. If you're planning on running certain bandwidth-intensive hardware or applications on the PCI bus, VIA's mysterious PCI-latency bug may bite. Patches are available from VIA (and others) that somewhat alleviate the problem, but I'm wary of the bug's persistence.