ABIT AN-M2HD
The Abit packaging is a deviation from their usual futuristic design, which is a shame, as the box art is quite hideous and is clearly aimed towards the female market. Barring this rather unusual choice of cover art, the rest of the packaging is typical for Abit with adequate information presented on the rear of the box.
The AN-M2HD package has a respectable level of connectivity options, SATA and IDE/floppy leads, a USB/FireWire bracket and a well written manual and quick start guide. The real stand out item in the bundle is the video cable. Here we have a HDMI>DVI cable bundled with the product. A first for any motherboard we have reviewed and something we hope to see becoming an industry standard in the not so distant future.
The AN-M2HD has a huge number of features and components and the PCB design has obviously been well researched and implemented. Particular mention should be given to the location of the 7050/Northbridge which is placed in the top left of the board and features a passive/silent cooler, as does the Southbridge. By locating the chipset in this location and moving the CPU slot slightly to the right, Abit have plenty of extra space in the centre and lower part of the PCB in which to fit the various components. On this board we have four SATA connectors, one IDE (which can support 2 devices) and one floppy connector. The card slots included are two PCI, one PCIe 1x and a single PCIe 16x. Some good design decisions have also been made in these areas with the SATA connectors far enough away from the PCIe 16x slot so as not to be “taken out” by larger graphics cards and coolers. There are also a number of USB headers on the PCB which should satisfy the needs of even the most extreme enthusiast user. Provided the user can lay their hands on 5 brackets up to 10 additional ports could be added, along with two FireWire (one four pin and one 6 pin). Memory support on the AN-M2HD stretches to DDR2-800 in combinations up to 8 GB.
The onboard graphics chipset is the GeForce 7050 PV which is a DirectX 9 part with Shader Model 3.0 support. There are two pixel pipelines and one vertex pipeline, with the core clock being 425MHz. Those building a media centre system for high definition playback are well catered for as the core supports VC-1, H.264 and MPEG-2 hardware acceleration as well as featuring smart scaling of low resolution video for higher resolution displays. As this is a DX9/SM 3.0 based product it fully supports Windows Vista’s Aero interface.
With regards to onboard connectivity we have two PS/2 ports and an optical out for audio, there are also a set of analogue audio connectors as well as connectivity for four USB, one FireWire and a single GB LAN. The most interesting connectivity are the video out ports. There is a Standard VGA port as well as an HDCP supporting HDMI connector (gold). This combined with the HDMI>DVI cable means that all of the major connectors for desktop or home cinema use are supported, however it is interesting to see that there is no option for S-Video or composite video which many other microATX boards still facilitate.
Abit have chosen to use AwardBIOS for this product and the configuration options are good for a microATX product. We have control of the multiplier (up to 25x) and HTT (up to 400MHz) as well as CPU voltage (up to 2.0v). Memory settings are fairly standard with settings up to DDR2-800 available alongside timing configurations, VGA shared memory is also configurable up to 256Mb and the memory voltage can be set up to 2.55v. These options along with some decent monitoring make the board a good candidate for overclocking, despite the smaller PCB.
