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In times where legacy-free designs are making waves, it is still reassuring to see the good old-fashioned serial and parallel ports. Even if there are fewer devices, including printers using the parallel port, this particular interface is still the favorite playground for hardware dongles necessary for running quite a few professional programs. Needless to say that also dongles are an anachronism but for certain users they are a must. The same goes for a variety of other devices including serial-interface digital cameras as the original Olympus Camedia series just to give one example. In other words, it is still nice to have legacy support and if it is only for the sake of not having to switch to a different keyboard.

Aside from legacy connectors, the A7V8X features a number of interfaces and necessary integrated connectors or else headers to support the adequate ports mounted on back-panel brackets. To start with the ATX I/O panel, the A7V8X features four USB 2.0 ports divided into two blocks, one of which is topped by the Gigabit Ethernet port enabled by the BroadCom BCM5702CKFB controller chip. The I/O panel further features analog audio I/O but no game port, the latter is supplied in form of a back-panel bracket and needs to be connected to the Game/ MIDI connector at that bottom edge of the PCB. The same bracket features two additional USB 2.0 ports which increases the total number of USB 2.0 ports to six.

The VIA VT6306 IEEE Firewire controller ports to two connectors at the bottom of the PCB

IEEE 1394 Firewire support is enabled via VIA's VT 6306 firewire controller supporting a pair of headers that can be connected to the bracket included featuring both big and small port types. In the past, we have often see brackets with both connectors but only one single header on the mainboard which made it necessary to switch cables to the bracket to accommodate the different types of Firewire peripherals. Fortunately, with the A7V8X, this Plug-Unplug-And-Play is a thing of the past.

The A7V8X features the PDC 20376 Promise RAID / SATA150 controller, in this case, with a single 40 pin parallel ATA connector that is tilted 90 degrees so that the cable is running off in the same plane as the PCB of the mainboard. Four years ago we saw a similar arrangement with the FIC PA 2013 only that then, it was the standard IDE connectors and we loved it. Finally, we see the same configuration reincarnated again and we still love it.

Promise ATA and Drive Initialization

The tilted connector supports ATA 33, 66, 100 or 133 and can be used to support drives as part of a RAID arrays that will have to use the serial ATA interface in addition to the parallel interface for either RAID 0 or1. In addition, a single drive is supported in master mode. The controller does not support ATAPI devices such as optical storage media. All of this makes sense since the controller really is a RAID controller and optical drives cannot be used for RAID anyway.

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