Back when I used Athlon XP’s I went through a plethora of motherboards trying to find one that worked the way I wanted, had the features I wanted and was reasonably priced. Eventually I settled on the NF7-S (2.0) which was a great board. As well as meeting the above requirements it was also an excellent overclockers board if you had the right CPU. Therefore when I decided to make myself a Pentium 4 system a couple of months ago the first motherboard manufacturer I looked at was ABIT, eventually settling on the AI7. Hoping for a similar experience to the NF7-S would I be disappointed?

Specifications:

The AI7 is based on Intel’s 865PE chipset. It supports 800/533 and 400FSB Pentium 4 processors using socket 478. Additionally the board also supports Prescott processors, or will do when they are available. The usual memory speeds are supported, officially the top supported RAM is DDR400 up to a maximum of 4gb and features Dual channel technology. On the Graphics front there is an AGP 8x/4x slot. You can install a total of 4 IDE devices (ATA 100) and 2 SATA drives (with RAID if needed). Other points of note are 8 USB 2.0 ports (4 onboard), 3 firewire ports (1 onboard), 5.1 channel sound (onboard) and onboard LAN (10/100). The board also features ABITs new UGuru technology for overclocking in windows amongst other things.

Processor
- Supports Intel Pentium 4 /Celeron CPU (Northwood)
- Supports Intel Hyper-Threading Technology
- New power design for Prescott CPU
- Front Side Bus: 800/533/400MHz
Chipset
- Intel 865PE / ICH5-R
- Supports Dual Channel DDR 400 Memory
- Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI) & FMB 1.5
Memory
- Four 184-pin DIMM sockets
- Supports 4 DIMM Dual Channel DDR 400 memory (Max. 4GB)
AGP
- Accelerated Graphics Port connector supports AGP 8X/4X (0.8V/1.5V)
Serial ATA RAID
- 2 channels Serial ATA 150MB/s data transfer rate with RAID 0 / 1
LAN
- On board Realtek 10/100 LAN
USB 2.0
- 8 ports USB 2.0 Supports 480 Mb/s data transfer rate
IEEE 1394
- 3 ports IEEE1394 Supports 400 Mb/s data transfer rate
Audio
- On board Realtek ALC658 6-channel CODEC
- Automatically Audio Jack Sensing
- S/PDIF Input & Output Interface
ABIT Engineered Technology
- SoftMenu™ Technology
- TweakGuard™
- ABIT uGuru Technology
ABIT EQ™
FanEQ™
ABIT OC Guru
ABIT Audio EQ
FlashMenu™
Black box
Internal I/O Connectors
- 1 x AGP, 5 x PCI slots
- 1 x Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB
- 2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100 Connectors
- 2 x SATA 150 Connectors
- 2 x USB 2.0 headers
- 2 x IEEE 1394 headers
- 1 x CD-IN, 1 x AUX-IN
- Front Panel Audio Connector
- CPU/Classis/Power/FAN1/FAN2 FAN Connector
- 20-pin ATX Power Connector
- 4-pin ATX Power Connector
Back Panel I/O
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse
- 1 x Printer Port, 1 x COM port
- 1 x S/PDIF In connector, 1 x S/PDIF Out connector
- 1 x Audio connector (For Front Speaker, Line-in, Mic-in)
- 1 x Audio connector (For Center/Sub, Surround Speaker)
- 2 x USB 2.0, 1X IEEE 1394 Connector
- 2 x USB 2.0, 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector

Upon opening the stylish box you immediately get the impression that this is a quality product. There are 2 sub boxes inside which tidily contain the add-on brackets and cables and the Manuals (of which there are 3 – Usermanual, Uguru manual and quickstart guide).

 

As you can see from the above pictures you get 2 SATA cables, 1 Molex to SATA power plug, bracket which adds extra USB ports, ATA and floppy cables and the EM shield.

Next: Board Layout and Systems

 

Select 1. Introduction 2. Board Layout and Systems 3. Pcmark02 4. Aquamark3 5. UT2003 6. Pcmark04 7. Max Payne 2 8. Sandra 2004 9. uguru 10. Overclocking 11. Conclusion