I think this motherboard was designed by microsoft (Abit KT7-RAID)

Member Name: luke_

Product:	Abit KT7-RAID
Date:	13/08/01 (1313 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: on board RAID, good layout, good price

Disadvantages: unstable, low front side but speeds, not for the beginner

I purchased this motherboard in November last year, realising that my k6-2-350 and pc chips motherboard just didn’t cut it with the more demanding 3D computer games cropping up. I use my machine mainly for gaming with my choice games being First Person Shooters such as Quake 3 arena and Half Life so an upgrade of motherboard and CPU was needed.

I had heard many great reports about the latest Athlon Thunderbird CPUs and they definitely weren’t wrong.

I hadn’t read many articles about a suitable motherboard to go with my newly purchased Thunderbird 850 but I had heard good things about the manufacturer ‘Abit.’ Reading the specifications on two of their latest products suitable for use with the Thunderbird CPU I decided to go for the RAID version of the Abit KT7.

For the extra £15 this board cost for the onboard RAID controller it seemed very worthwhile considering the performance boost, which the RAID can provide with a good set up.

For those who don’t know what this RAID controller is, it’s an extra pair of IDE channels on the motherboard which are hardware controlled to have 2 similar hard drives set up in such a way that you can double the speed at which a single hard drive works. This is RAID mode 0 known as ‘striping.’ This works by spanning information over 2 hard drives, with half the information on one drive and half on the other drive, when data is requested, the band width of each hard drive can be used so in effect you are able to retrieve data in half the time it would take with a single drive. Hard drives don’t have to be the same size or same speed but you will only have double the capacity of the smallest hard drive and double the speed of the slowest hard drive.

The other mode is RAID 1, known as ‘mirroring.’ This doesn’t give your system any extra performance but does give the security of a backup onto the second hard drive so i
f one hard drive should fail you can carry on using the other.

This RAID controller supports up to 4 IDE devices and a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations can be used and set up quite easily through a BIOS option when you boot up your computer.

The specifications of the KT7 RAID are as follows:

Supports AMD Athlon/Duron Socket A 200MHz FSB Processors up to 1250 but you can now go up to 1400 I believe with the latest bios.

It uses the VIA (KT133) /VIA 686A chipset

Has an on board Ultra RAID DMA 100 High Point HTP370 IDE Controller

Uses Abit’s superb SoftMenu™III bios Technology to set CPU parameters. This is extremely simple to use, following each option through with the manual telling you what each option does and gives great overclocking ability. You can manually set the CPU clock multiplier, front side bus speeds which can be increased in 1MHz increments for overclocking the last few MHz out of your CPU and the core voltage for the CPU which is a vital factor in overclocking the CPU, as more speed needs more voltage but this also creates heat so you need a good CPU cooler such as the excellent pure copper Canine Hedgehog. As the speed of your CPU is the clock multiplier x front side bus speed. You will only be able to overclock the front side bus speed of this motherboard to around 112MHz which is a bit of a let down now that the latest boards are reaching FSB speeds of near 200MHz! You will also only be able to manually adjust the clock multiplier if your AMD CPU is ‘unlocked.’ You can find more details on this at www.hexus.net

Three 168-pin DIMM sockets support PC100/PC133 SDRAM memory modules for easy upgrading of your RAM.

Three 168-pin DIMM sockets support

1 4x AGP slot, 6 PCI slots and 1 ISA slot offering superb expandability for installation of extra hardware for example, network, graphics, SCSI and sound cards.

Enough of the technic
al crap and on with what the board is actually like to use. Installing it was a bit fidly as the holes didn’t quite line up with the motherboard-mounting studs on my motherboard tray. I don’t know which item is at fault so I wont give either a bitching for that.

After it was properly mounted I connected up all of my other hardware very easily and all cable were easy to fit so top marks for the layout of the board.

I booted up and easily configured the great BIOS as mentioned earlier. Had my Athlon thunderbird 850 running nicely at 1020MHz.

After reinstalling windows I experienced many problems. My Soundblaster Live! Was causing all sorts of problems because it has issues with the VIA chipset and so eventually after trying it in every PCI slot I managed to get it more stable in slot 4.

After installing the latest VIA 4in1 drivers to give better driver support for the motherboard hardware I started getting random system reboots and my system kept hanging on boot up just as it displayed the desktop. I found this to be a problem with a Segate hard drive driver and so after renaming the driver file this problem was fixed.

After the 1st few weeks I had been experiencing many stability problems. I found another problem with the APM (Advanced Power Management) controlled by the motherboard. Whenever I put the computer into suspend mode it wouldn’t come back alive forcing me to reset. The best way to resolve this is to disable APM in the bios and you should find it all suspends ok then.

I upgraded windows 98se to windows 2000 professional and found it to be a lot more stable than windows 98 and so I’d highly recommend you try this.

For about 2 months now I have been running fairly stable and happily using my system although there is still the odd stability problem. I recommend the latest beta VIA 4in1 drivers from viahardware.com if you are using any version of windows. I am using the 4.2
9s at the moment but you can try the latest ones and see what work best for you.

This board has a few teething problems which take a bit of work to iron out so I wouldn’t recommend it. Documentation is pretty good on the whole but not all BIOS options are explained very well and the english is not always great. Last month the fan on the north bridge stopped working so i took it off with no adverse effects, I emailed Abit for a replacement and go no reply. I sent a letter but no reply still! Customer services are terrible and I definitely wouldn't bother with them again.

There are many newer, faster boards with better technology and far less problems. I’d recommend you look at the Epox and iWill motherboards.

Summary: