Abit KT7A-RAID

Until the KG7 and KG7-RAID came along, this was Abit's top of the range Socket A board. With support for any current Thunderbird processor, 1.5GB of PC133 RAM and up to 8 hard drives, it certainly sounds impressive. Using the KT133A chipset (with the VIA 686b Southbridge) means that the latest Athlon C models can be used, running on a 266MHz DDR bus - especially good news for those with unlocked 200MHz bus CPUs. The 686b has had its fair share of problems, though, with a particularly nasty data corruption bug involving large data transfers over the IDE bus. There are also reports of problems with SoundBlaster Live cards - indeed, my own 1999 SB Live Value ...  Read the complete review

This motherboard is excellent for everybody, whether you are just going to have a "normal" system or you are going to go the whole hog and overclock you system to the hilt. Like everything you get what you pay for, and this even though expenese (around £125 max) it is still a good board because of all the extra feature you do/do not get. On this version of the board you get RAID functionality, which means you could have upto 8 IDE devices plugged into this mobo. For performance you could have 30 identical Hard drives plugged in and raid to gain extra performace or increase data intergrity, by using the RAID in its different modes (0,1, or 0 + 1 - for ...  Read the complete review

The best Socket A mobo out there, the only thing which compares is the Asus A7V - Advantages: SoftBios, Fast Bus, RAID setup - Disadvantages: Price