| Product: |
Abit KT7A |
| Date: |
05.07.01 (286 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Feature packed - Raid too., great bios / wide range of options, Solid build quality
Disadvantages: Can be confusing for beginners to setup
After my Abit KT-7 Raid motherboard's Bios became corrupted, it was a long 4 week wait for a replacment. Imagine my surprise and delightment when Abit replaced it with their newer model, the "KT-7A Raid". The "A" designates the new Via chipset which supports the new Athlon chips with a 266mhz front side bus. As I'm considering replacing my current Athlon 900 with an Athlon 1.3ghz, this new motherboard is perfect. Before my mobo broke, I considered exchanging it and taking a loss, having to pay more money to get the newer board - so the faulty board was a godsend.
Why is the KT-7A so good, and why should you consider it?
Abit have made good boards for a long time, and have a great reputation for stability, quality and innovation. Where many board manufacturers simply copy each other, Abit leads. Abit were the first board manufacturer to install a heatsink and fan above the North Bridge, for example. They also rotated the bridge through 45 degrees to reduce the length of the connections and give greater performance.
The Kt-7A Raid motherboard has a wide range of interfaces, ranging from AGPx4 for the latest graphics card, to PCI slots and even an old ISA slot which is great for old cards like Creative's "Soundblaster Vibra 16", which is still a useful budget sound card.
Two standard IDE sockets are supplemented by a pair of high performance Raid sockets, running off a Highpoint 370 controller, which offer UDMA-100 functionality. For owners of fast hard drives this is great, enabling faster system performance. And for owners of 2 hard drives, you can install these as a RAID array (reduntant array of inexpensive devices) with either mirroring or stripe options.
Raid gives incredible system performance and makes purchasing a second hard drive very worthwhile - especially now you can buy a good quality Seagate UDMA 100 / 20 GB hard drive for only £75 - that works out at £150 for Raid
which is great value! For people using their PC for intensive tasks, or even for 3D game players it's well worth looking at.
The board is really well built, with a clean layout and solid feel. There are 3 power points for cooling fans, in addition to the built in North Bridge fan. Serial, parallel, 4 USB, PS2 keyboard and mouse sockets - everything's included.
One of the best features is Abit's "soft menu) Bios - which is feature packed and lets you tweak just about anything on the board. Overclocking is very easy - I run my Athlon 900mhz at 1GHZ just by changing the Bios multiplier settings - without any hassle or problems. With all those cooling fans it never runs too hot...
The unique selling point of the board is the Raid function, but combine that with the solid build quality, wide range of functionality and the option to use Pc-100 or the faster Pc-133 memory and you've got a great board which will see you good for several years to come.
It's affordable too, around £130 for Raid and £90 for the Kt-7A non-raid version. Enjoy...
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