Motherboards And Memory

Abit: Server Boards For Opteron

The AA7 Max is based on the 925X chipset from Intel and uses all of its features.

You often have to do a lot of searching in order to find new products, but with Abit they are abundant. At present, Abit has committed itself to the server market and offers two motherboards for two and four Opterons. This move was prompted by a customer's direct product request. The dual Opteron boards offer not only the usual features but also a RAID Zero Port for a retroactive upgrade of RAID controllers (for example, from Adaptec).

The other new motherboards are similar to those of its competitors. The AA7 Max, for one, is based on the Alderwood chipset, alias 925X. However, you can tell that Abit is optimistic about the success of PCI Express because, in contrast to the competitors, this board offers three PCI Express slots but still only two PCI slots.

The AV8 is Abit's latest board for the AMD Socket 939. It comes with the VIA K8T800 Pro. Also, Abit wants to use the PT890, if possible, but as with other manufacturers, they are still a little reluctant concerning the possible implementation of an AGP slot and x16 PCI Express.

Thecus is the name of Abit's next product innovation. Abit is venturing into new territory with this NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. However, the product has already garnered a good response according to statements by partners and distributors. It comes with four ATA hard disks, which are connected to their infrastructure by way of a 100 Mbit network connection (see photo below).

The AV8 is based on VIA's K8T800 Pro and supports future AMD processors with Socket 939 and 1 GB/s HyperTransport.

The repositioned Northbridge cooling system is also designed to cool the graphics card.

VG7 is the name of the prototype board with the PT890 chipset for the Pentium 4, including PCI Express and AGP. It remains to be seen if VIA will manage to work out the chipset as well.

Thecus is an independent NAS system for up to four hard disks.