The best of the 'old' Athlon boards (Abit KA7-100)

Member Name: Bezuk

Product:	Abit KA7-100
Date:	20/06/01 (725 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Highly reliable, Supports a lot of the newest technology, Loads of DIMM banks and PCI slots, Great for overclocking and tweaking in general

Disadvantages: Not that cheap, BIOS updates rare, GeForce 2 glitch - read on

Abit’s KA7-100 is based on VIA’s KX133 chipset. The KX133 is now old news; it was designed to work with AMD’s old-style Slot A Athlon processors and is incompatible with the newer Socket A (Socket 462) Athlons. If anyone were to buy a new motherboard today it would not be this one. However, I’m not going to focus too much on this but more on why if I had to choose and upgrade board for my Slot A system or a second-hand system, I would choose this one.

In terms of processor support, the KA7-100 supports every Athlon that was ever made in the Slot A format. This includes Athlons from their start at around 550 MHz to the Athlon 1GHz, the fastest chip ever made in this factor. Very few 1GHz chips were made in Slot A though, so it’s doubtful that you’ll find one easily. The processor mechanism fits easily on to the board, although I had a slight problem in that the support for the heatsink/fan I was using was being obstructed by a capacitor on the board.

You’ll need RAM as well, and the KA7-100 can help you out here. It has four DIMM banks, more than almost every motherboard I’ve seen. Thanks to the KX133 they all support the faster PC133 memory. PC133 is a standard for RAM nowadays. Not to worry if you don’t have PC133 memory though, the old PC100 stuff works fine too. Each DIMM bank will accept a maximum of a 512MB module, so this motherboard is potentially capable of an insane 2GB RAM. An extensive RAM buffer means that data transfer errors are unheard of.

Hard drives and CD-ROM drives definitely have their uses, and this is one of the areas where the KA7-100 excels. IDE is the mechanism by which most computers connect drives, and whereas most motherboards have only 2 IDE ‘channels’ capable of accepting 2 drives each for a maximum of 4 drives, the KA7-100 has 4 IDE channels. 2 are Primary IDE channels routed to the motherboard’s IDE controller and 2 are linked to an ext
ra IDE controller, in this case the excellent HighPoint HPT370. This means the motherboard can take 8 IDE devices. You might be thinking that 4 is enough, however I have four IDE devices running now: a CD-ROM drive, a CD writer, an LS-120 Superdisk drive and my hard drive. If I wanted to add another IDE disk such as a DVD player or second hard drive, I wouldn’t be able to on many other motherboards.

All four IDE channels accept the newer standard for hard drives, UDMA66. However, the HPT370 device (and therefore the 2 channels associated with it) go a step further with UDMA100 support. Almost all hard disks that can be bought today have UDMA100 support, so you’ll probably get a few extra kicks out of your hard disk by connecting it to one of the HPT370 device’s IDE channels. The HPT370 also offers support for RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), a high-end feature of use to those with multiple hard disks. Two RAID modes are supported: RAID-0 essentially merges 2 hard disks into one larger one, while filling them both up evenly. RAID-1 mirrors the content of one disk onto another, which is useful for backups. If you have no use for the HPT370 you can disable it in the motherboard’s BIOS setup screen.

As far as expansion slots go, the KA7-100 offers an AGP slot with AGP 4x and Fast Writes support. This is all you’ll need for the newest graphics cards, even today. Whereas most boards offer only 3 or 4 PCI slots, the KA7-100 offers 6. Considering the vast variety of PC expansions and upgrades offered in PCI format, the extra slots will come in useful. If you have an old ISA device, the KA7-100 has one ISA slot, however ISA devices have been pretty much phased out and many new motherboards don’t have any ISA slots. Externally there is one parallel port, two 9-pin serial ports, 2 USB ports and a PS/2 connector for mouse and keyboard.

Reliability is excellent. This board has never failed to work, and I&
#8217;ve not noticed a glitch or bug with the board itself, apart from one that I’ll come to in a bit. The BIOS setup menu is also excellent, with a lot of options for power-hungry tweakers. Abit have also added an excellent innovation to this board – their SoftMenu III technology allows excellent software overclocking of the CPU. Abit boards have always been ideal for overclockers and this one is certainly no exception.

There are drawbacks – the biggest one I’ve noticed is a glitch with my GeForce 2 GTS. A problem with the board causes the AGP slot to be given insufficient power when booting from cold, so the BIOS does not detect the card and fails to boot. A quick tap of the Reset button sends it booting on its way. It only applies when the PC is cold, not when you restart. Also, my board is an early revision and this most likely doesn't happen with later versions. This according to Abit is a known problem with the board and long ago I had the chance to send the board back to be fixed, however I didn’t because I didn’t want to lose the PC for a month. Also, this is an old board and BIOS updates are rare.

A quick tip: when using the KA7-100 or any other board with a VIA chipset it’s very important to use the VIA Service Pack (also known as the 4in1 drivers), especially when running Windows 2000. This particularly applies to 3D game performance. The latest 4in1 drivers can be obtained from http://www.viahardware.com

This review wouldn’t be complete without a quick warning: despite the fact I’ve given it a high score and it’s an excellent board, it’s not the newest technology. Buying the board without sourcing a processor first would not be a good idea IMO because the Slot A chips are not that easy to find now.

In summary: if you want a Slot A board with great reliablility, good overclocking potential and loads of room for expansion, with the added advantages of
UDMA100 and RAID support, then the KA7-100 is the KX133 board for you.

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