Taiwanese ABIT Company was once renowned for its mainboards among overclockers and all users who were not satisfied with the standard feature set of their PCs. It was then that ABIT announced advanced (according to the standards of that time) technology for adjusting system parameters without jumpers. It was called SoftMenu. As time passed by, more manufacturers were becoming involved into making mainboards for a demanding user. The “revolutionary” SoftMenu technology became a standard and ABIT products couldn’t stand out due to this no longer unique feature against the competitors’ background. Moreover, the company committed a grave blunder: KT7/A series mainboards were quite fast and functional, but they didn’t support Athlon XP processors because not all necessary contacts were laid out. So, the trust of users to ABIT as to a manufacturer of stable and reliable products went down a bit. ABIT found itself in danger of becoming just another maker of “ordinary” mainboards, good-quality and functional, but not any different from the others.

But the company didn’t give up and struggled to regain the name of a manufacturer of something exceptional. Another step on this path was the announcement of the MAX mainboard series concept. These mainboards were loaded with a lot of integrated controllers, but had none of “old” ports like PS/2, COM or LPT. The most “innovative” thing was the absence of PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, which was quite a problem as USB keyboards were not widely spread. It meant that the user often had to buy a new keyboard and mouse along with the mainboard. There were few people who wanted to do so. ABIT realized the tendency and returned PS/2 ports into its mainboards in the MAX2 series. They still didn’t have COM and LPT ports, but this deficiency was not that urgent. As far as we know, ABIT was quite satisfied with MAX2 series sales. Moreover, the announcement of such mainboards once again brought ABIT into the spotlight.

The company didn’t abandon “usual” products with COM and LPT ports, however. Although they didn’t draw much attention to themselves, they were still in demand and brought in some profit. Besides that, ABIT started producing value mainboards on Elitegroup’s facilities, but that is another story already.

So, as we have said, ABIT mainboards have a rich features set, but this is no wonder nowadays. Various ports (for example, FireWire) are implemented even in entry-level products. It’s clear that there must be some “zest” in ABIT mainboards for the user to be willing to count out extra money for it. This trump can only be high overclocking potential. Thus, all new mainboards (except value ones) from ABIT do show good overclockability. Even MAX2 mainboards were good at overclocking, notwithstanding the huge number of integrated controllers. For example, AT7-MAX2 mainboard for Athlon XP processors easily came over 200MHz FSB frequency.

The mainboard we review today belongs to the “mainstream” category. It means it has less integrated stuff onboard (in fact, there is only one integrated controller providing Serial ATA support) and is equipped with “out-dated” PS/2, COM and LPT ports. At the same time, we can’t say the mainboard lacks functionality. It’s based on NVIDIA nForce2 chipset with the “advanced” version of the South Bridge (MCP2-T), which features a number of very and not very useful functions. ABIT claims this mainboard has really high overclocking potential. Overall, it’s an interesting product. By the way, its name is NF7-S.