Overclockers paradise!
Written: Dec 15 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Rock solid stability. Easy soft-menu bios setup.
Cons: Slightly more expensive that other boards of similar capabilities.
|
|
|
| gagrawal's Full Review: Abit KT7 Motherboard |
If you are an overclocker with little time on your hands, an abit kt7 is the best bet. Why? Because of its soft-menu BIOS setup. I love the fact that I can experiment around with various voltage,FSB and multiplier settings through software rather than mucking around with jumpers. Greater freedom to experiment means better chances of getting the right settings with less frustration (even the best boards in the world will give you some frustration .. count on it).
I bought this board as it came highly recommended from both Tom's hardware and Anandtech hardware review sites. The manual is fairly well documented albiet full of grammatical errors (some times you have to guess what the author is trying to say). Apart from that, it is a very stable board. I did have some initial problems getting my AGP card recognized but after making sure everything was seated well and pushed in hard into the slots, I have not had that trouble since then. I have pushed my Duron 700 to 850 mhz (I plan to push it beyond 900 eventually once I get some time to experiment around with the voltage settings) and not once has win98 crashed mysteriously for no reason (though there have been games and other software locking up for whatever software conflicts they get into). In other words, so far I can only attribute the crashes due to windoze problems and not of the Kt7. IMO, the kt7 is a rock solid stable motherboard.
KT7 comes with the Via 686A bridge which means it supports ATA/66 standard but not ATA/100. Most boards now coming out with Via's kt133 chipset have the 686b bridge which supports ATA100 standard. However, it does not make a difference to me. I have heard about others complaining about it. But there have been no perceptible performance difference in the current hard-drives supporting ATA/66 or ATA/100. Until the ATA/100 hard-drives themselves do not improve, I don't think this should be an issue at all. In the long term, if this is going to be an issue .. well .. by that time everything in your system will be an issue (obsolete) as well.
In a nutshell, overclockers would benefit most from this board. If you don't plan on tweaking your system, there are cheaper boards out there with similar base capabilities. I have a duron (running at 850mhz) with 128mb PC133 SDRAM and 32mb GeForce2 MX card and turtle beach Montego II card, a ricoh cdrw etc. Oh yes! I forgot to mention this board comes with 4 USB ports (some boards come with only 2). So that could save you from buying a USB hub for some time.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
gagrawal
|
|
Location: New Jersey, USA
Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
I'm a computer geek in the telecom industry. Hope to be a pilot.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.