Great choice for Athlon/Duron
Written: Dec 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: great specifications, supports all latest processors, best available chipset, lots of expansion possibilities
Cons: you pay top buck for quality like this
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| CyrixDes's Full Review: Abit KT7 Motherboard |
This motherboard in my opinion, is the best possible choice that anyone can make when they are looking for a solution for Socket A Athlon and Duron processors. The great thing about AMD's latest offerings is that people can upgrade from old PII/K6-2/MII systems and get a big speed increase upto Duron machines and then can upgrade safely using the same motherboard and components upto an Athlon. That is what is so good about AMD converting Duron and Athlons to the same Socket A architecture. It means that AMD can rely on a large percentage of their customers business for a long time to come.
While AMD can rely on companies offering brilliant boards like ABIT do for their architecture, they are always going to be up there at the top of the processor market. This board continues ABIT's reputation as one of the best motherboard makers around.
It offers so many excellent specs and details that apart from the price possibly putting some people off, this board has to be on the wish list of people going to Durons and TBird Athlons. The chipset is at the heart of a motherboard controlling all the main aspects and that is why it is important to get the best chipset possible. ABIT have done this in using VIA's latest KT133 chipset. This supporting AGP 4x for the latest graphic cards means that your system is sure to fly along when taking advantage of the many advanced features this motherboard has.
There is a good possibility for expansion when using this board. There is the standard 1 AGP slot, a very spacious 6 PCI slots and the nice inclusion of an ISA slot for any legacy cards that people may have in their present systems. Obviously there is 2 USB ports, the standard serial offerings and the inclusion of UDMA 66 support for some of the latest Hard Drives although it is a little disappointing to see no inclusion of UDMA 100 support on this board although i'm sure ABIT will remedy this in future updates of the board.
The board has 3 DIMM memory slots supporting PC100 and PC133 MHz SDRAM upto 1.5Gb of memory in slots of between 8Mb and 512Mb. Also for setting CPU options, this board uses Softmenu III, allowing the changing of FSB speeds to alter your CPU's speed.
The board comes in ATX form factor with hardware monitoring including voltage, fan speed and system temperature allowing the option of automatic shutdown on sense of excess temperature that could be damaging to components.
Overall here we have a board which continues ABIT's reign at the top of the motherboard manufacturers. If I was to upgrade to a Duron or an Athlon I would most certainly do it using the ABIT KT7 motherboard.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
CyrixDes
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Member: Dale Warren
Reviews written: 56
Trusted by: 5 members
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