VIA Technologies continues to fight back its positions in the chipset market as more and more mainboard makers adopt the products of Taipei, Taiwan-based core-logic designer. ABIT, one of the most famous producers of enthusiasts-oriented hardware, very recently announced its VI7, an exotic mainboard based on VIA PT800 core-logic.

The new mainboard is built using rather rare green PCB and provides nearly all the capabilities typical mainstream user may dream about. Besides, following the latest trends, ABIT equips its new product with features for tweaking and overclocking.

Specifications of ABIT VI7 are very natural for a mainstream and not expensive mainboard of Summer 2003:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4/Celeron processors with 400/533/800MHz FSB with 3.20GHz clock-speed and above;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• VIA PT800 chipset with VT8237 I/O controller;
• 2 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC2100, PC2700, PC3200 or higher-speed DDR SDRAM memory;
• 5 PCI and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-33/66/100/133 integrated controller;
• 2 Serial ATA-150 ports;
• 8 USB 2.0 ports;
• 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter;
• 6-channel AC’97 audio solution with SPDIF support;
• Lots of additional functions, including technologies like ABIT SoftMenu, ABIT TweakGuard, ABIT CPU ThermalGuard, ABIT FAN Secure, ABIT FlashMenu  and so on;
• Overclocking functions, including Vcore, Vmem and Vagp adjusting, FSB settings, etc;
• ATX Form Factor.

Pricing, availability and Prescott support questions were not touched upon at press time.