According to this French source, ABIT is going to start shipping its new Socket A mainboard based on the new VIA KT400 chipset in September already. This mainboard called AT7-MAX will be a new product without the COM and LPT ports support.

AT7-MAX mainboard will have 4 memory slots for DDR333 SDRAM, an AGP 8x slot and 5 PCI slots. The major salt of the novelty, as well as of other ABIT MAX mainboards is the great number of supported ports and protocols. See here: the new AT7-MAX will have 6 USB 2.0 ports and 2 IEEE1394 ports, it will support 2 SerialATA-150 channels implemented via the integrated Marvell88i8030, a dual-channel ATA/133 RAID controller implemented via the integrated HPT374 chip, 6-channel sound with S/PDIF Out and 10/100Mbit Ethernet. Of course, the mainboard will also support overclocking friendly SoftMenu III technology.

As you can notice, ABIT AT7-MAX will still be very much different from the previous MAX solutions. For instance, the new solution has fewer USB ports compared with the other products from the same family. However, instead AT7-MAX returned PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard. It looks as if the users were not very much inspired by the necessity to shift to USB manipulator and keyboards, preferring third companies’ solutions. Now the situation has become slightly changed, however, the new AT7-MAX lost some of its revolutionary features and became a similar to many alternative solutions from other mainboard makers.

The price of the new chipset hasn’t been yet disclosed.