ABIT SR7-8X (SiS 648): DDR400-Powered

ABIT SR7-8X: Basic Features

We'll start off this section of the review with a look at some of the more basic features found on the ABIT SR7-8X motherboard.

The SR7-8X is not a part of the now famous ABIT MAX series of motherboards that were introduced last March. As is quite apparent in the picture above, the ABIT SR7-8X is not legacy free like the ABIT MAX motherboards. The SR7-8X comes with conventional legacy ports options in the form of one PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse connector, two serial port connectors, and one parallel port connector.

Continuing along we see two USB 2.0 ports situated below the standard 10/100 Ethernet port. These ports constitute the only non-legacy items of the I/O options.

Rounding out the I/O options is the Game Port, with standard options for Line-in, Line-out, and Mic-in. Other additional features include two extra USB headers for an additional 4 USB channels, two CD audio input connectors, and three fan headers.

The SR7-8X has plenty of expansion slots to choose from with 5 PCI slots and 3 DIMM slots for up to 3.0GB of DDR200/266 memory or 2.0GB of DDR333 memory (2 DIMM slots). We should note that running 768MB of single-sided DDR333 Kingston memory at default settings (three 256MB sticks) was painless.

The SR7-8X also supports hard drives speeds of up to 133MB/s (ATA133), which is as good as it gets for IDE hard drive bandwidth. Since the SR7-8X doesn't come with any onboard RAID, you're stuck with just 2 IDE channels for a maximum of 4 IDE devices. This isn't a terribly low amount of choices actually, but there are certain users that require more than 4 IDE devices in a computer system.

Additionally, ABIT utilizes the SiS 648's integrated LAN functionality through the Realtek 8100B chip. The Realtek 8100B chip is located just above the left corner of the AGP 8X slot. ABIT also takes advantage of the SiS 648's native AC'97 sound functionality through the ALC200 chip (2-channel sound).

Of course, we can't forget the 648 chipset itself, constituted of the SiS 648 North Bridge and SiS 963 South Bridge. As we've covered here before, the SiS 648 includes features such as:

1. AGP 3.0 (or AGP 8X) support.
2. 1GB/s I/O interconnect, aka MuTIOL.
3. Official Northwood-B (533MHz FSB) support.
4. Native support for USB 2.0, 1394a (FireWire), ATA133, Ethernet, and basic 6-channel sound.
5. Unofficial support for DDR400 memory (SiS648 only "officially" supports as high as DDR333 memory).