its great, but i should've bought the KT7-RAID
Written: Jan 06 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: great motherboard, overclocks well
Cons: RAID offers more IDE channels
|
|
|
| kishioka's Full Review: Abit KT7 Motherboard |
I bought the Abit KT7 for about $150 shipped. It’s a socket A motherboard featuring Via’s KT133 chipset. I have the NON-RAID edition. The Abit’s best feature, of course, is its overclocking capability accomplished solely thru its BIOS (no need to flick any jumpers at all!).
If you have a Duron/Thunderbird and want to overclock, this is the board to do it with. You’ll need to unlock the chip via connecting its L2 bridges (you’ll have 2 look elsewhere to see how to do this). Once you do though, testing different CPU speeds is a snap with the KT7. Just change the number in the bios from say 6 to 9 (my Duron is running about 900mhz, though its originally a 600mhz chip).
Here are some examples of the bigger things you can do using the KT7’s SoftMenu system.
You can change:
CPU multiplier
FSB speed
Memory speed (100mhz/133mhz, to do more you need to alter the FSB rate)
Memory options (timing-CAS2,3, 4way interleaving, etc.)
Some things to keep in mind. The KT7 is a big board. Also, it has a whole host of capacitors right next to the CPU. Some CPU coolers don’t fit on it. Also if you’re not going to overclock, don’t bother with this board. The whole point of the SoftMenu system is to allow you to boost the performance of your computer with ease. You can get cheaper boards that perform just as well if you don’t want to fiddle with your motherboard.
KT7-RAID. In retrospect however, I should’ve bought the Kt7-RAID. The RAID offers two more IDE channels based on an ATA-100 standard. Having more channel simply allows so much more flexibility as far as adding hard drives, etc. for an extra $20-30.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
kishioka
|
|
Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 1 member
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.