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.