Abit's New Motherboard Lays On The Ports

An enthusiastic reader submits: "Possibly the most innovative motherboard to be released in years, Abit's MAX series intends to dive headfirst into the next generation of computing, leaving legacy ports behind in their dust. Hardcoreware.net has the first full review of this board, which has support for 10 USB devices and 12 (YES, 12) IDE devices." I wish it had even more built-in USB ports, but six is a good start.

Comments

Terabyte system for the masses?

[bravehamster]

4 Channels on an integrated RAID controller? Lets see, with 8x 120GB drives, that gives you 960GB, at less than $2000 for the entire system (assuming this board will be less than $200). Not quite a terabyte, but if you moved to 8x 160GB drives, that gives you about 1.3TB, but makes it quite a bit more expensive.

Not that you would _want_ to put 8 drives in a RAID 0 array. The chances of failure and total data loss are just too high. But it's cool that you can.

12 friggin' IDE channels. The mind boggles. Perhaps I can finally use up all the bays in my full-size tower. It looks mighty pathetic with just my CDRW and a floppy.

The venerable Mac

[cluening]

You know, Apple got rid of legacy ports a loooooong time ago (at least in computer-time). Of course, I am still a fan of legacy ports (where would all of my cool old hardware plug in?), but this doesn't seem groundbreaking on the grand scheme of things. Heck, Sun even went all USB on their SunRay appliances. Yeah, they aren't "real computers" but still. But, alas, the world is dominated by "innovation" from Intel and Micros~1, so until they do it, it hasn't been done. (like the "first optical mouse" that Micros~1 came up with a couple years ago - what do you call the optical Sun mouse I have that has "1992" stamped on the bottom of it?)

Re:No PS/2 keyboard and mouse? no *way*

[curunir]

why are PS/2 ports labeled as "legacy"?

Because USB does everything PS/2 does in a more flexable way. It's nice to be able to hook the mouse into my keyboard or the back of the computer or even into a USB hub. Computer makers like USB because it eliminates the need to color-code everything. With PS/2, the tech on the phone always has to think, "did this moron hook the keyboard into the mouse port?"

Re:Funny....

[AmPz]

A PC without RS232 ?! Now, the RS232 is probably the industrys most common interface. It's clean, it's simple, it's fast (using proper interrupts, compared to USB style). They claim that this board is aimed at the geek market. Ok... Let me ask one thing... the USB interface, is it amined at the geek market? Noo, it's supposed to simlify things for non geeks. Geeks work closer to the research at university's and the industry. You wount find USB in either places. Geeks use real ports, like the RS232, RS485 (a great multidrop interface that supports up to 10Mbit and 1km long wires!, and is as cheap and simple as RS232, but sadly enough it is only used in the industry) I consider myself fairly geeky, I'am a hardware designer and embedded software programmer. Ths USB is a insanely complex interface software wise, it consumes lot's of CPU power since it lacks DMA support (everything except USB and the floppy has DMA theese days), and it sucks at realtime applications (anyone with a USB mouse knows that). I don't want this board. And I'd advise anyone against buying it, since it lacks proper ports. The only ones that might want this board are OEM's (everything integrated, and only USB ports so that stupid users don't get confused by all the ports) Oh... Yes... There is another niche.. It might get the warez server market because of all the IDE chanels.