Abit takes the less-is-more approach when it comes I/O connections on the backplane. Ditching many of the extra connections we see many motherboards still using, Abit allows for better air flow instead of having a mass of connections and legacy connectors. The I/O connections included are eSATA (external serial ATA), PS/2, USB 2.0 and the Dual Gigabit LAN connections. Simple and to the point is how Abit keeps it. This minimalistic approach works just fine for me. Parallel and serial connections are getting long in the tooth and out-dated and its time more boards begin to phase these out.


Abit included some very stylish blue LED’s on the back of the motherboard. Personally, these don’t work for me and I am waiting for a BIOS update that allows me to totally disable them. LED’s just aren’t my thing and I don’t really like the extra lighting in my room when it's dark -- say, watching a movie -- even though it isn’t really that bright. Some people will love them, however, and they can by modified with 3 levels of brightness.

The BIOS is the Phoenix AwardBios. I am running the 1.3 B1 BIOS. The pride and joy of the BIOS is the uGuru overclocking section. With a vast amount of adjustments, voltage, temperature, and speed monitoring options, this BIOS is built for overclocking. You can select which options in the BIOS you want monitored -- say all your voltages and just a few fan speeds. Then when you boot in to Windows and us the uGuru GUI panel, you can see the items you wanted monitored and overclock right from within Windows -- very handy! The FSB is adjustable from 133MHz-600MHz in 1MHz increments. The RAM multipliers available are 533, 667, and 800MHz. The CPU voltage can be modified from 1.3625V to 2.65V via .0250 increments. The DRAM voltage, PCI Express Speed and the i975X MCH voltage are all adjustable.



Layout Summary

Overall this board looks incredible. The color theme is great with the black and white accents with a touch of blue. It wouldn’t look out of place in most cases.

The main problem I have with the component layout is the positioning of the PCI slot, and/or lack of a second PCI slot. If you are using a dual GPU set up like SLI or CrossFire, you will have no way to use the PCI slot, thus excluding you from using your very expensive X-Fi or PhysX cards. This could be remedied with a second PCI slot, but it’s not to be found here. And while Abit’s AudioMax sound is better than your typical onboard audio, it still isn’t the level of a Creative X-Fi card. Thus I would rather Abit ditch the AudioMax slot for a second PCI slot. Most high-end enthusiasts don’t use onboard audio, especially us gamers.

The 5-6 SATA ports aren’t impossible to reach in the middle of the bottom of the board, but they don’t aid in cable management whatsoever as SATA cables will be stretched across your board to reach these, or behind the board and then around the bottom. The 7th SATA port is pretty much worthless in my opinion. It’s all the way up by the CPU, as it has to be near the eSATA port on the back of the board. I wouldn’t run a cable that out of the way for a 7th port and I don’t know many people that would. Moreover, how many of us have a need for a 7th SATA connection anyhow? Not many.

I would have preferred the dual ATX 12V connections on the mid-to-south end of the board near the other power connections, primarily because I use a P180B and running those cables that far up was a hassle. Another location for these jacks would have been nice.