The best high performance board today for Athlon
Written: Nov 11 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: 4 DDR slots, AMD 761, RAID, No jumpers, 8 IDE ATA100, AGPx4 - just prefect
Cons: No automatic control of the CPU fan speed
The Bottom Line: The best Athlon Socket A board - best performance, stability and great expandability. It has the best memory performance for Athlon.
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| pla's Full Review: Abit KG7-RAID Motherboard |
I was upgrading my PC with Athlon 1.4GHz and looked around for good motherboards which would be of use to me for long.
I bought this board because it was with the best performance and flexibility. Let me list the features with explanations.
1) One of the best things is that the board doesn't have any jumpers - all is done through the BIOS. You can adjust CPU and FSB speed and even the voltages from the BIOS setup. This means no need to open the case and look for jumpers. Great for over clocking.
The CPU multiplier is increased by 1/2 and the FSB clock by 1MHz.
2) DDR
The memory is very important for the performance. For Athlon based system DDR is the best one so far. It is almost twice as fast as PC133 SDRAM and costs the same - 256MB/$36. It is very important how it is supported. The KG7-RAID uses AMD 761 Northbridge which has a lot better performance then the VIA's one.
It has 4 slots for DDR(2100) which means up to 4GB of ram. You can use up to 2 unbuffered DIMMS which is limitation in the AMD 761. To use 4 DIMMS they all have to be registered.
It supports only DDR.
3) RAID - it supports raid 0 (Stripping), 1(Mirroring), 0+1 (Stripping and Mirroring)
It has 2 RAID ATA100 EIDE channels and to normal ATA100 EIDE channels. This means up to 8 EIDE devices. The raid can be used for increasing the performance (Stripping is when you have 2 hard drives and want to save a file it simultaneously sends half of the file to the first drive and the other half to the other drive which doubles the speed)
4) CPU
it supports all the newest Athlon t-birds up to 1.5 GHz. You will need BIOS update for newer. My friend bought the same board with Athlon XP 1600+ PR and all he had to do was just to update the BIOS for the new processor.
5) it has 6 PCI slots and 1 AGP 4x, no ISA
4 DIMM slots, 6 PCI slots and 8 EIDE drives - this is a lot of expandability.
4 USB ports
It doesn't have any integrated peripherals so you can put what you want to. And when you need upgrade you would just change the device instead the board.
I reviewed a lot of motherboards and this one had the best performance in almost all benchmarks.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 160
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Epinions.com ID:
pla
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Member: Plamen Parvanov
Location: San Francisco, CA
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 1 member
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