reliability is a problem (Abit KA7-100)

Member Name: adriang

Product:	Abit KA7-100
Date:	10/01/03 (639 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: performance, large memory capability, very tweakable

Disadvantages: reliability, Abit tech support

Technically, this is one of the best of the old AMD Athlon slot-A motherboards. This is confirmed by the other reviews on this site, and also from some of the hardware review sites out there on the web.

Abit have generally built motherboards for enthusiasts, and for several years, I have had an Abit BP6 motherboard, which is the only motherboard capible of running dual celeron processors. Something that Intel said was impossible.

Some users had bad experiences with the BP6, I did not. So when Abit bought out their Athlon solution, with the KA7, and then followed with the KA7-100, it was the top of my list. When the positive reviews started to appear, that was the decider. My new PC would be based around one of these motherboards.

At that time, Easter, 2000, only the KA7 was available. The KA7-100 followed, with the difference being it had an extra ATA-100 hard disk controller, that was also RAID enabled.

This means it could give faster harddisk performance, providing that that the harddisk drive itself was also capible. RAID is a big subject, but in a nutshell, means one of 2 things.

1) you can take 2 harddisks, and make them appear to the operating system. So take 2 40 gig harddisks, and according to windows, they will be one, 80 gig harddisk. The advantage being that you actually have 2 disks doing the job of one.

2) mirroring. You can have 2 disks. You are only using one, but the second one is actually duplicating everything (mirroring it), so that is one was to fail, you have a back-upo.

There are other RAID features, but they are primarily for real business use.

My Machine was the KA7 motherboard, with an Athlon 700mhz processor, 256meg memory, and a 40gig harddisk drive. It also had one of the original Nvidia GeForce Video cards, the GeForce256 (aka GeForce 1).

It was a good machine, and had great peformance in comparision with what was available at that time. I used it fo
r playing games, ripping mp3 files. My girlfriend used it for her email, and web browsing.

Benchmarking results using some of the utilities out there was very good.

So far so good!

So after about 2 years, it gave up the ghost. No gradual degradation, just one day, I went to power it on, and it just did not work. The bios check, also known as the POST, did not happen, just a blank screen. None of the usual power up 'happenings' occured, things like the Caps Lock, Srcoll Lock and Num Lock lights on the keyboard flicking off and on.

After testing the video gard in aother PC, which worked. And trying a working one in the machine, with no result, I got a collegue to put my processor and memory into his machine. They worked fine.

Now I was suspicious of the motherboard, the Abit KA-7, being faulty.

After searching the web, I found lots of forums and newsgroups, all disucssing the reliability of both the Abit KA7, and KA7-100 motherboard. The symptoms were identical to mine. The cause is that the capacitors are of a low quality, and start to break down. The capacitors are componets that are actually soldered onto the motherboard, and there are a lot of them. When I looked closely at my motherboard, the capacitors are starting to melt, and there is black gunk, a bit like tar, underneath them, on the motherboard itself.

No I need a new motherboard. I was planning on getting a new PC, but wanted to keep this one working as both my GF and I can use it for work. This is going to be difficult as I need a new motherboard, and getting hold of any Slot A motherboard is hard.

I am pretty miffed over the fact that Abit has used low quality components, and looking at the various forums, etc, I am one of many that has been hit by this problem.

What is also ironic, is that the dual celeron, Abit BP6 motherboard, that I mention at the begining of this review (rant?!), was fine for me, but d
id have known capacitor issues for a lot of other users.

This means for me, that Abit might make great boards, especially for enthusiasts, but they have a reliability problem which is not specific to one particular board. So I will be avoiding Abit motherboards in the future.

Summary: