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In our tests, the performance of this
board is pretty good if you were to run in the official DDR333 mode but
it lost some and win some when we compared it to the Gigabyte 7VAXP
KT400 mainboard. Although it can run with our Corsair at DDR400
(unofficial mode), the performance level actually dropped as we have to
tone down the ram timings to make it stable. As DDR400 is no longer
"supported" by VIA KT400 chipset, we left out the benchmarks
in the charts.
Feature wise, this board has a feast of
great features. Whether you use it or not is another story. Seriellel is
just one of those neat innovative features found on the AT7-MAX2. In
fact, ABIT is the first company to even think of making it possible. The
board has all the latest connectors available like USB 2, 1394, SATA
RAID, 6 ch audio, 10/100 LAN Ethernet. They would probably want to
include Gigabit Ethernet or probably the Wireless LAN 802.11b or even
802.11a built onto the board.
Overclocking wise, we only managed to
run our processor AXP 1900+ up to 145Mhz FSB. If you have a unlocked
CPU, I think the chances of reach 200Mhz and above is highly possible as
there are options for 6:2:1 available in the BIOS for selection. For
more options on overclocking, you can refer to our Gallery
p4 for more details.
Installation is very straightforward.
The only dislike is that there are 2 small capacitors blocking the AGP
retention clip and this makes removing of AGP card very difficult. If
you use too much force, there is a chance of damaging the capacitors.
Documentation is concise and easy to
understand. It's a multilingual manual and provide instructions in
languages like English, Chinese, Japanese and other languages. The
instruction on how to use the Serillel should be more specific.
Retail price : USD 173*
* pricing based on pricewatch.com
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