Abit's AT7 is unlike any motherboard you may have seen in the past (with the exception of the IT7, the AT7's Intel sibling). One look at the I/O back plate tells you all you need to know - there are no legacy ports.

Instead of the serial and parallel ports that are usually found at the rear, there are four USB1.1 and two USB2.0 ports along with two IEEE1394 FireWire ports. Joining these to complete the back panel line-up are the audio connectors for the 5.1 integrated audio chip - line-in, center/sub, surround and front speakers plus Mic-in. There's also a LAN port.

The other thing that catches the eye is the number of IDE ports; six in all. Two are Ultra ATA 33/66/100/133 channels with support for up to four devices, and four channels are supplied for the integrated ATA/133 RAID setup which can support up to eight Ultra ATA 33/66/100/133 devices. All of which means the AT7 can support up to a staggering twelve - yes twelve - drives.

The RAID setup is controlled by a HighPoint HPT374 controller, which enables RAID 0 (striping mode for boosting performance), RAID 1 (mirroring mode for data security) and RAID 0 + 1 (striping and mirroring for the best of both worlds).

The AT7 is built around VIA's latest KT333 / VT8233A Northbridge / Southbridge combination and provides four DIMM sockets that can take up to 3GB of either PC1600, PC2100 or the latest PC2700 DDR333 memory. It's definitely a powerful, feature rich board.