Delivering on both the AMD and Intel fronts, Abit's MAX line of motherboards (consisting of AT7 and IT7 respectively), not only contain cool features such as on-board 100Mbit Ethernet and UltraATA/133 RAID, but also removes a few features we've all been accustomed to for the last decade and a half or so � legacy ports. Gone are the serial, parallel, and PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. In, are USB2.0 ports and IEEE-1394 (FireWire) ports ready to introduce you to a whole new world of peripherals. This is a good thing considering that those legacy ports lurk on the ancient ISA bus (yeah, it never really went away). If you�re familiar with your busses, you�ll know that having an ISA device enabled will slow the performance of the overall system down. Removing these abominations will finally bring a new era of high-speed peripherals that are mainstream. The more FireWire and USB2.0 devices there are, the less they�ll cost. If more and more motherboard manufacturers follow Abit�s initiative, we�ll be seeing a plethora of these high-bandwidth devices appear in no time.