Opening the box the first thing we see is the accessories. I’ll take a closer look at these before moving onto the AX78 properly.

First out of the box are the cables individually sealed in a polythene bag, now Abit have been somewhat “frugal” here, no doubt to keep costs as low as possible, as you only get a single sata cable, meaning I WILL need to raid my own stash of cables as I have 4 sata devices to connect up, a single IDE cable, a single floppy drive cable (when are floppy drives going to die??) and a single Molex to sata power converter.

Next out of the box is the rear i/o panel, again wrapped in a cellophane bag.

Finally, before moving onto the AX78, we have the driver disk and paperwork consisting of a manual and a sticker showing the motherboard layout with pin outs for the front i/o connector and cmos reset switch / jumper positions. A nice little inclusion which you can stick on the inside of the case side panel which would save digging out the manual should things go a bit wrong when messing about with the bios etc.

Moving onto the AX78 its self, digging deeper into the box we find the AX78 wrapped in an anti static bag, as always these days and no less than expected, and reasonably well protected by the box.

Removing the motherboard from its packaging we get our first proper look at the AX78. It seems very well laid out and the first thing that I notice is the large gap between the main graphics card pci-e, the orange slot, and the next pci connector, even fitting a dual slot cooled graphics card shouldn’t render any other pci slots unusable which is a welcome touch. The Northbridge and power regulators are heat pipe cooled, which is good to see on a board of this value, with rather nice blue anodised heat sinks. The Southbridge has a matching normal low profile heat sink.

The rear I/O connections are a little basic but all the necessary ones are there, we have 4 USB connections, audio (up to 7.1 + mic), network, mouse and keyboard. No firewire or esata but, as mentioned before, for the vast majority of users this wont be a problem. We also have optical out and rear cmos reset, both of which are a bonus.

As always on the abit motherboards I have reviewed the onboard connections are very clearly labelled to the point where you probably wont need to refer to the manual if you are confident and have built a few computers, if not it is always a good idea to double check with the manual.

Even though the AX78 is towards the budget end of the market Abit have included their onboard numerical diagnostics display which displays error codes should the system hang mid boot, a very useful feature that could be invaluable should the worst happen and the pc not boot at any time. The now practically obsolete floppy connector is also included.

Moving around the board a bit, next to the numerical readout, we find the Sata connectors and the ide connectors. Again these are clearly marked.

Moving on we have the memory slots again very clearly labelled, I would have like to have seen a little more spacing between them, even if it was set out as two banks of 2, but it wont be a problem unless using high performance memory that requires high voltage and decent airflow, I’m not even sure what voltage you can supply to the memory yet, being a low cost motherboard it may not allow for a lot of bios tweaking. Next to the memory in its usual position is the main power connector for the motherboard.

Carrying on around the motherboard we get to the CPU socket and surrounding this area are, as briefly mentioned before, the main chipset coolers. The chipset coolers are orientated to take advantage of any air being blown off of the CPU cooler. Located next to the power regulation cooler is the ATX power connector, a little close but hopefully shouldn’t prove to be a problem.

Last but by no means least is the expansion slots. As I mentioned earlier they are very well laid out and unless you use dual graphics cards with dual slot coolers you shouldn’t have any issues whatsoever. Three pci slots and a single x1 pci express slot along with the dual graphics card slots offer plenty of scope for system expansion.

The AX78 uses the standard style caps, as seen between the pci connectors, in favour of the slightly better solid state aluminium clad caps used on more expensive motherboards so a little more cost cutting has taken place there. All in all though it feels like a well-put together motherboard that should suit the needs of all the users that want a motherboard in this price bracket.

Next Page - Installation and Testing