Overclockers dream
Written: Aug 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very Stable Very fast, Very overclockable. No Jumpers
Cons: Asus board is a bit faster
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| thepanther's Full Review: Abit KA7 |
Over the years and the different makes and Chipsets of boards, the main reason for buying Abit boards has been the fact they offer great overclocking facilities. The KA7 is no different to all the rest.
The KA7 features soft menu III which allows alterations to the FSB (Front Side Bus). It also offers a clocking facility on the Processor chip only and not the components. The feature seems to be pretty unique and is great for getting extra performance. The fact that your computer crashes when overclocking does not mean that its your processor thats at fault it could be some of the other peripherals also. This is because when you alter the FSB you also alter the AGP and the PCI bus speeds. It could be the video card at fault for example.
By only altering the processor clock you can acheive extra speed that way. I have been using the board for a couple of months now and am very impressed with it so far. I have tried overclocking my Athlon 700 and have reached 800 with no obvious problems allthough I did not run it for more than a day, mainly because 700 is easily enough speed to have.
6 PCI slots is more than enough for anyone, because if they were all filled you would have IRQ problems anyway, As allways the ISA slot is PCI shared but that is not a problem. There is only the one though which you would expect from a newish motherboard. It would be best though to check the amount of ISA components you currently have before you upgrade
It seems very well layed out, I have before had a lot of problems with boards having connectors too close to the edge of the board or too close to each other. This causes alot of problems when working inside the machine. Fitted inside a good quality you will have no problems getting around the board once fitted, should you need to. The motherboard itself is jumperless so that at least is one less reason to delve in to the depths of the PC case.
It comes highly recomended as an Athlon board and the KX133 Chipset is by far and away the best Athlon chipset on the market. It supports UDMA 66, PC100 and PC133 DIMM's and aslo has AGP4x support.
Benchmarks show that this board is an elite choice but does have one rival which in the end pips the KA7 on speed. That board is the ASUS K7V currently the best Slot A board out there, does cost about $30 more though.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 150
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Epinions.com ID:
thepanther
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Member: Stevie Orgill
Location: Burton-on-Trent, DerbyShire, UK
Reviews written: 65
Trusted by: 13 members
About Me:
Passing on my own experience from my business in Computer Hardware.
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