Abit has announced their new MAX motherboard series at CeBIT 2002, Hannover - Germany. As of now there are two of these new feature packed motherboards that Abit has given information about: the Abit IT7 i845E-chipset for Pentium 4 processors Abit AT7 with VIA KT333-chipset for AMD Athlon CPU's Read more... Features: Legacy-free - no more PS2 or serial ports, therefore 6 USB ports partly USB 2.0; 2 Firewire ports Maximum Memory - 4 DIMM slots 4-Channel UDMA 133 RAID - HPT 374 RAID controller (max of 12 IDE devices) 6-Channel Audio - 6-channel sound with digital input and output integrated 10/100-MBit-LAN MediaXP - MediaXP moves some USB and audio ports up to the front panel SoftMenu III Hardware Monitoring 3 PCI slots Secret ATI Optimizations??? Well there is a rumour floating around in certain forums that Abit and ATI have been working closely together on performance optimzations using hardware instructions on the KT333 chipset. I'll just paste what is available of this information and let you decide what to think of it: *The ABIT 333 has more instructions written for ATI. What do these instuctions do you ask? *The extra instructions help the cpu translate and calculate 3d enable ps1.4 overflow during interchange channel stages... these stages allow more cpu instructions to be brought to the vid card(only ATI) *ps1.4 is currently unusable on any KT266-A mobo or any mobo its software so far You ask why its only in software so far? *Lied to us ati... ps 1.4 needs hardware to be used hardware such as extra cpu instructions You think oh no! *ps1.4 is used but not to its full potential So what now? *Thus the new mobos will help ATI 8500 come back to its feet How? *With these new instructions... all versions of the 8500 will get a estimated 12% speed increase Does this only affect 1.4 shaders? *If the game doesn't support ps1.4 (there are 14 extra instructions... only 5 are for ps1.4) but if the game doesn't support ps1.4 then only 9 will work but the speed increse will be still there We all know there are 22 instuctions in ps1.4 is this a DX8.1 optimized motherboard? *NO only and updated instuctions on the nortbridge only 8 instructions are being used in any ps1.4 demo now. Well this help smoothvision performace? *Even though the vid card programs FSAA its sent to the cpu with set of instructions to decode... these new instructions help those euations on the cpu to be smaller thus the action will be quick Will this increase the smoothvision performance? *8500 has almost no where to go Bandwidth issue? *Yes this will be completely fixed in upcoming ati cards Does this help in high polygon games? *In the games test thus far yes What games? *quake3........SSE..............unreal2..........Kreed.........3dmark2k1........... Will the extra instuctions help the gf3,4 series? *No only ati specific instructions. The gf3/4 do not have directx 8.1 thus none or these instuctions would benifet nvidia cards at this time. I would advise you to take all of this with a grain of salt but it would be interesting to learn the truth of all of this. This conversation is said to be held with an Abit representative. Source: Rage3D forums