Abit of a media PC

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The AN-M2HD comes in a box destined for the iPod generation with a funky looking girl dressed in chav-like purple shell suit, naturally listening to headphones and a remote in her hand; enjoying her HD experience.

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Inside the box you find lots of goodies, including four locking SATA cables, the backing plate, a driver CD, a HDMI to DVI cable, a PCI bracket with FireWire (small and large) and two USB connectors, a floppy disc cable and an IDE cable. Of course, you also get the motherboard itself.

This motherboard is nice and small, conforming to the mATX standard allowing for its usage in small PC’s, or more importantly a media centre case. Packed into this board is nVidia’s nForce 630a chipset with GeForce 7050PV. These are more than just numbers, and most important is the 7050PV.

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Thanks to the 7050, you’ll get a rather insignificant looking HMDI socket which allows you to run a huge HD TV if you are lucky enough to own one. Not only this, but this chipset also has HDCP. While a pain in the ass of any king pin pirate, HDCP is unfortunately looking like the future. HDCP allows you to play HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs at their native quality, rather than reverting to DVD quality on non-HDCP devices. As HDCP is licensed, Intel levy a tax on every board abit makes in return for a unique key. Not only are you paying for the right to play discs that you have bought, but you are also paying for this feature to be developed and extended. Also included in this licence is that Abit have to make it difficult to pirate, copy and generally enjoy what content you are playing.

While there are tons of downsides, abit have done all the hard work, and all you need to worry about is connecting your HDTV to this HDMI port and seeing movies in their full glory. Coupled with this HDMI connector is a standard VGA port allowing you to use last century’s technology. Powering this is a GeForce 7 series card, which is named in a fashion to confuse anyone trying to compare to the standard add-in variety. The manual isn’t too helpful, although it does support Direct X 9, Shader Model 3.0, PureVideo HD and nView.

If you think that HDMI is too much for you, you can use the other board in this range, named the AN-M2 which instead of HDMI, it has a DVI port and loses the FireWire connectivity.

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The board itself has the usual connectors and bits and pieces that you would expect, including a PCI-e x16 slot, a PCI-e x 1 slot and a couple of PCI slots for good measure. Annoyingly the PCI-e x1 slot is right below the x16 lane, meaning that it’s unusable if you use pretty much any high-end graphics card. Fortunately, I’m yet to see anything useful fit into one of these slots, even though it’s been out for months.

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As with most motherboards now, there is only one IDE port, meaning that you can have a maximum for two PATA drives, which is more than likely only going to have a CD drive connected to it. Thankfully, as I like to backup anything important on floppy discs, there is still FDD support. There are four SATA ports which all have basic RAID ability, and you’ll need to make a floppy disc from the provided CD if you want to install Windows with it enabled.

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There are a total of internal USB connectors which are all placed in a useful area and all next to each other. The 3GB/s SATA ports are in a 2x2 formation above these. If you enjoy overclocking, then the CMOS jumper is in an equality accessible area at the bottom of the board. After building and replacing several computers, front panel connections become a major annoyance, as most aren’t marked and getting the LED’s the right way round is trail and error. abit feel my pain, and have colour coded the pins and drawn a cross on the positive pin. Thank you :). Front panel audio header pins are located at the bottom left of the board right next to the Realtek HD audio chip which isn’t in the best spot but makes sense from abit’s point of view. Below this is the FireWire header.

To power this board, you’ll need a 24 pin ATX plug, and a 4 pin plug. Both of these sockets on the board are near the top meaning you won’t have chunky cables drapped over the board. All of this power unfortunately creates heat, but abit have sited four fan headers around the board, with the CPU header supporting PWM which makes the boards Cool ‘n Quiet feature even better.

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The board doesn’t have any active cooling in its own right, making it silent. There is a large black heatsink stamped by the side of the rear ports. There is also an abit branded heatsink on top of the chipset. This one is much smaller and has a lower profile allowing for large graphics cards to be used.

The back of the board has plenty of ports to connect all your peripherals which includes mouse and keyboard PS/2 slots, optical out, HDMI, VGA D0sub, 5 port 7.1 out and mic-in audio, FireWire, RJ-45 network and four USB slots. DVI is supported by the included HDMI to DVI cable.

The CPU area is relatively clear of any surface components, allowing for excessive cooling options, although the RAM slots are a little close which could cause problems. On the topic of RAM, this board supports up to 8GB of standard 240pin DDR2 RAM up to 800MHZ FSB. Of course this is all dual channel allowing for greater bandwidth.