Yesterday ABIT announced its NV7M mainboard based on a very curious nForce 420D chipset from NVIDIA.
We would like to point out right away that ABIT preferred to save time and trouble explaining the thing about the memory bus width (128bit or 64bit) depending on the number of memory modules installed into the DIMM slots. They decided to equip its product with only 2 DIMM slots for PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM, while most of the similar solutions from other manufacturers have three of them. Maybe, it’s for the better, who knows. Especially since the use of three DIMM modules on the boards based on this chipset makes nearly no since. So why should they increase the mainboard cost for nothing?
The other mainboard specs look as "standardly-good" for a fully-ledged desktop solution. The board is designed in MicroATX form-factor, have 3 PCI slots, an AGP 4x slot (only 1.5V), integrated GeForce2 MX graphics core, 2 DIMM slots supporting the minimum DIMM of 1GB (no ECC support), MCP-D South Bridge with Dolby Digital support (there is an SPDIF Out), integrated Realtek 8201 10/100 Ethernet controller.