KT400 was expected by AMD fans because VIA promised a superior performance, closer to Intel’s imposed new barrier. From the technical point of view we can hardly see AMD Athlon as a solution able to face Pentium 4. But we have to appreciate that AMD has done everything possible to maintain their processors' performance at a decent level while keeping their prices down. Although the new Athlons are manufactured in 0.13 micron technology it seems that there are no many resources left for AMD to increase clock speeds. The bus speed is an important factor in a CPU overall performance that's why the latest Athlon processors run at a 333Mhz bus, which means that the memory bus is now synchronized with the FSB, so you will experience lower latencies and you will be able to overclock better. The new KT400 "officially” supports 333Mhz FSB, one of the reasons why the chipset was so expected. The first review of a KT400 based motherboard will be done using an Abit motherboard, a successor of the Abit AT7 MAX.

First look

Abit AT7 MAX2 is shipped in a special box, the standard Abit package for its high end motherboards. Inside the second plastic box you will find a lot of gadgets. Beside the motherboard, you can find two IDE cables, one floppy cable, one IDE to serial ATA adapter, one serial ATA cable, one ATX shield, several plastic cable holders, one USB bracket, one floppy disk, one CD with drivers and the manual. Abit AT7 MAX2 is a motherboard targeted to the upper layer of the market. Most of the Abit products come with good manuals and Abit AT7 MAX2 is no exception; in fact the manual is outstanding. We will discuss later the manual's characteristics, until then I will describe the motherboard's layout. There are five PCI slots, one AGP and four DDR slots. Compared with Abit AT7 MAX, Abit AT7 MAX2 is targeted to a wider market. Abit AT7 MAX reviewed several months ago at PC Hardware was not the most perfect choice for overclockers because it had only three PCI slots and no PS/2 ports. AT7 MAX2 doesn’t have any serial/parallel port like the older AT7 MAX, but Abit decided to include the PS/2 ports. That’s quite a good idea because many users complained about the USB mouse and keyboard support. Other that this, many enthusiasts invested in expensive input devices and they didn't fell very comfortable with the idea of changing them.

The motherboard is perfect for users who want a lot of toys onboard. You can find IEEE 1394, eight USB ports, six channels audio and LAN right on the ATX shield. The level of integration is high, for USB 2.0 the motherboard uses VIA VT6202, for LAN support it uses VIA VT6103 and for audio a Realtek ALC650 controller. Like the old AT7 MAX, the new series use TSB43AB23 for the IEEE394. Personally I don’t like the VIA LAN chip due to its compatibility and performance. However, for an integrated computer the VIA chip does the job quite well.
The motherboard layout is very good, despite the fact that there are a lot of devices onboard. The CPU socket is well placed and you can use a pretty large heatsink. The ATX connector is also in a good position, between the CPU socket and the memory slots. The board has a four pins 12V header which is placed near the AGP slot. Although theoretically you can use large PCI cards on AT7, you may run into trouble in certain conditions. The chipset cooler looks quite interesting and should be pretty effective. The same design is used on video cards.

Abit AT7-MAX2 product picture

There are several headers on board: two for additional USB 2.0 ports, and one for the Abit Media XP. Fortunately all are placed between the edge and the fifth PCI slot. It makes quite difficult to operate with additional headers while the board is in the case, but the airflow is improved. Abit Media XP is an optional device from Abit which relocates several input ports in the front of the case. In order to use Abit Media XP you will have to set several jumpers, in fact the only jumpers which can be found onboard except the clear CMOS.

The absolute new things on AT7 MAX2 are the serial ATA connectors. Although serial ATA is far from being widely available on the market, most motherboard manufacturers hurried to adopt the new sexy interface. To answer to your storage requirements, AT7 MAX2 has beside the standard chipset controller a HPT374 RAID four channels controller. The interesting point is that two channels are serial ATA. We will discuss later about serial ATA advantages and constrains.