The Motherboard

The AT7 Max isn't so much a revolutionary motherboard as it is an evolutionary motherboard, with its lack of legacy connections being a natural progression of today's technologies. It's therefore important to note what you don't get as well as the features that you do get. You won't find any PS/2 ports for your mouse and keyboard; users are expected to use USB peripherals instead. There are no serial or parallel ports either, so if you have a printer or modem that uses either of these, you had better either have/buy USB/PCI capable devices or go without. There are only 3 PCI slots on this board. It may seem a bit low to many, and in normal circumstances it is. However, if you take into account that there is already very good onboard sound as well as LAN, that's 2 slots that you don't need. Firewire PCI card? Not needed, there's Firewire onboard. There are always situations for some that will require the use of more than 3 PCI slots, in which case you may as well stop reading now, this board is not for you. Another thing to note right now is this motherboard is designed for use with a Windows ME/2000/XP OS only.

The layout of this board on first glance is very clean and lean. On closer inspection you can see it's packed with features and headers for expansion. We shall start our tour at the CPU socket and work our way around from there.

Looking into the zif socket of this board you can see the thermister for the temperature of the CPU to be taken. So for those of you using an Athlon XP the internal diode, even though board is capable of using it, is once again useless. With a board this far thinking in its design this would have been a very nice feature to see, but alas it isn't so. Speaking of Athlon XP's, at time of writing this, the latest bios has support for the Thoroughbred XP's. Looking around the socket you can a very nice holographic tape strip to help protect the traces underneath from screwdrivers if you slip whilst attaching a HSF. The socket itself is also at the very top of the board which is a great place to put it. HSF wise, the mounting points for the Alpha's and Swiftech's that use them are here, and there is plenty of room to use such a cooler. You can also see the 6 MOSFETS here once again indicating the 3 phase power design which should aid in overclocking and general stability. There is a nice gap between the capacitors here, strategically placed so that there is plenty of room to get to the clipping mechanism of a standard HSF. The Northbridge is actively cooled again this being something that Abit introduced and continues to use.

The power connecter sits between the zif socket and the DIMM slots at the top of the board. This is a great place to put it as it means that your power cable won't be draped across your HSF or any other components on the board. You can also see next to the power connecter 2 of the 5 fan headers. These appeared to be too close, but installation of a 3 pin fan wasn't a problem at all.

4 Slots for memory are found here, compared to most other boards that give you 3. I found that capacitors on the top of the board and large Graphics cards in the AGP slot, whilst not actually stopping me from removing the ram, did stop me opening the clips for the ram fully.

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