The Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard -- Buy One RAID Now!
Written: Nov 14 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Uses Economical Socket-A Chips, IDE Raid for Excellent Expandability
Cons: Slightly Expensive (but well worth it!)
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| radioguy's Full Review: Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard |
The Abit KT-7 Raid is the perfect motherboard to serve as the heart of a tail-kicking digital video non-linear editing system. All systems are go: socket-A connection for use with high-value AMD Duron and Athlon "Thunderbird" processors; HPT 370 IDE Raid controller; Softmenu BIOS for software control of all essential systems parameters, allowing overclocking without resetting any jumpers; and an ample set of PCI expansion slots.
With street prices running from $150 to $180, the KT-7 Raid is not the cheapest board around, but if you merely adjust for the value of the HPT 370 Raid controller, the board represents an excellent value. A basic IDE controller on the board will handle as many as four drives using up to the Ultra DMA 33 specification. You might want to use this to control a (relatively) small, inexpensive drive to handle your operating system and application software. Those of you who need to store video data, with its attendant need for high-performance hard-drive reads and writes, will be happy to note that the onboard HPT 370 Raid controller will control up to four devices of either the Ultra DMA 33, 66, or 100 (a.k.a. ATA 33/66/100) specification.
Depending on how many drives you use, you can set this IDE RAID up in one of four configurations. In the RAID-0 mode, known as stripping, you'll be "stripping" two drives together, allowing data to be read or written sequentially in sectors from first one drive, and then the next, greatly increasing the performance potential versus what you'd have with a single drive. The RAID-1 mode implements what's known as mirroring, in which you have two drives which get identical reads and writes, resulting in drives which are "mirror" images of one another. While this doesn't boost performance (except in as much as you might be using a higher Ultra DMA standard, such as 66 or 100, versus 33), it provides you with a complete data backup drive if you end up having one of the two drives in the RAID fail. Since it's extremely unlikely that both drives will fail at the same time, this gives you a pretty safe insurance policy against losing your data in the case of one of the drives expiring (a not-unknown occurrence). Finally, for folks who'd like to invest in four IDE drives, the HPT 370 controller allows what's known as RAID 0+1, in which you have two identical two-drive high-performance arrays, thus giving yourself both the performance advantages of a stripping RAID along with the security of mirroring.
While the purchase price of the KT7-RAID is a bit high, you can economize by running it with one of AMD's inexpensive-yet-high-performance Duron CPU's. The Duron's start out with a 600 Mhz chip, with a street price of around $70, a 700 Mhz chip that goes for about $75, a 750 Mhz chip that sells for about $90, and an 800 Mhz chip for around $115. According to tests at leading hardware sites, such as Tom's, the Duron blows the Intel Celeron (of a similar speed) out of the water and actually comes quite close to equaling, if not downright blowing the doors off, similar-speed Pentium III's.
All in all, you can equip the KT7-RAID with a very capable Duron CPU for about a C-Note. Try that with a Socket-370 board. Keep in mind that, while the Duron has 128Kb of L1 cache on-chip and 64Kb of L2 cache on-chip, all the cache works together simultaneously, giving you the equivalent of 192Kb cache. However, if you're performance hungry, you can equip the KT7-RAID with one of AMD's Athlon "Thunderbird" chips. Besides using the Socket-A form factor instead of the Slot-A factor, the Thunderbird Athlon's have a 128Kb/256Kb L1/L2 cache configuration versus the 128Kb/512Kb configuration on the physically-larger Slot-A Athlons. The Socket-A Athlons currently run from 750Mhz to 1.2Ghz with prices starting at around $140 and topping out at around $540. Keep in mind, that over-$500 price is for the top-of-the-line 1.2Ghz chip. Just dropping down 100 Mhz to the 1.1Ghz Thunderbird will bring the price down to around $400. The great thing about the Socket-A boards is that you can start with very decent 7 or 800 Mhz Duron for about $100 and then have the option to later upgrade to full-scale Thunderbird chip. Most likely, when you're ready to get a performance boost in a year or so, the Thunderbird chips will have dropped down quite a bit in price.
As for memory, the KT7-RAID has three 168-pin PC133 SDRAM DIMM sockets, allowing you to stock the board with a maximum of three 512Mb memory modules, for a total of 1.5 Gigs of RAM. Working with the board's VIA KT133/ VIA686A chipset and the Softmenu control of system parameters, you can overclock the system bus, so you might want to go for the Kingmax TinyBGA PC150 SDRAM which, as the name implies, will let you run the memory bus up to 150 Mhz.
For video, you've got an AGP video card slot, which will operate at the 2X and 4X levels. For your other expansion cards, you've got six PCI slots. Finally, there's an ISA slot (for that modem you just can't throw away) which shares physical space with the farthest-from-CPU PCI slot.
The board is ATX and, per that standard, has built-in expansion ports, including two serial, one parallel, floppy, keyboard, mouse, two USB connectors, and a header for attaching two additional, optional, USB connectors.
Other features include monitoring of fan speed, system voltages, and system temperature. There's a Wake-on-LAN and a Wake-on-Modem header and an Infrared transmit/receive header.
Software features include the Softmenu III technology which allow all you overclocking enthusiast to set all kinds of CPU parameters (core voltage, I/O voltage, etc.) through software commands alone, without resorting to picking around at jumpers with your needle-nose pliers. The Award Plug-and-Pray BIOS includes the Write-Protect Anti-Virus function.
With the wonderful array of economically-priced, high-performances CPU's you can use with the Abit KT7-RAID, its capability of taking on an IDE RAID with as many as four drives, and the Softmenu III allowing convenient overclocking without messing with jumpers, this motherboard provides an excellent value in the present along with a great upgrading potential for the future. Go directly to your favorite on-line hardware merchant, do not pass GO, and buy an Abit KT7-RAID, now!
Recommended:
Yes
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radioguy
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