The Abit KT7-Raid is A Top Socket A Board
Written: Sep 29 '00 (Updated Nov 27 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: ATA-100 RAID support, solid stability, good overclocking features.
Cons: Pricey.
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| Zeorai's Full Review: Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard |
Abit is a company well known for making more enthusiast type products. They really don't do much business in the OEM sector so that means in order to move product they really have to innovate. This is exactly what they've done for a number of years now. The first move was Abit's now legendary "Soft Menu" which allowed you to adjust front side bus settings through the Bios instead of having to use jumpers. This made overclocking a breeze and pretty much made it mainstream. Just check out there Slot A motherboard, it was the first one to offer ATA 100 support built in. Now Abit comes to the fore with there top of the line SocketA offering the KT7-Raid.
The KT7-Raid uses a pretty standard layout. But a few things you will notice right off the bat are the heatsink and fan on the northbridge chip. Interesting. The other thing of note is the wide space around the actual CPU socket. There are no capacitors sitting nearby, a very important factor if you want to put large heatsinks on easily. Other than that the board's 3 DIMM slots, 6 PCI, 1 ISA and 4x AGP slot are pretty standard. Missing is an AMR or CNR slot, I think this is pretty cool since I've never seen a AMR or CNR peripheral in my life. Plus, those slots are more for OEMs and system builders anyway than regular users.
Installation was pretty quick and easy. However, getting the board to work right turned out to be far more difficult that it should have been. I put the KT7-R in to a Super Micro SC750A full tower case, it's a monster, but has excellent air circulation. Anyway, I had a lot of problems getting the system to post, at first I thought it might have been a conflict with the Sound Blaster Live Platinum card so I pulled it and had just the video card, hard drive, RAM and CPU in it and it still either didn't post or was highly unstable. Now I was at a loss.
Upon very close examination I noticed that whenever I put the video card in, the far end (end away from the VGA connector) was actually going deeper in to the slot than the end with the VGA connector. What was happening was that the board was sitting too low on the side where the cards stick out. Just low enough that whenever I put in the AGP card it didn't sit flush and so of course the mobo didn't think there was a video card at all. Bingo! So how'd I fix the problem. I took the paper washers that are sometimes used in between mounting screws and the motherboard and put them on the screw risers that the motherboard sits on. I used 3 stuck together with thermal paste (it's sticky and very heat tolerant) inbetween the risers and the motherboard. Next I put the AGP card in and started her up. I've never had a problem with posting since. So if you're going to put a KT7 board in a SC750A or any other full tower case, keep this situation in mind if you're having any trouble.
The KT7-Raid's stability is excellent. I'd have to say it's probably the most stable board I've seen from Abit. I have yet to try out it's overclocking features, but I've heard you can control both the FSB settings and the clock multiplier from Soft Menu. Of course to control the multiplier setting you have to have an unlock Athlon or Duron CPU. The main reason I've not gotten in to overclocking is because I already have a 1 Ghz processor in there and that seems plenty fast for everything at the moment. But I know I'll be tweaking it sooner or later, just as soon as I get a little bored I bet. The KT7 and the Raid version both come with Soft Menu 3 so that means you can change the FSB settings in increments of 1, meaning total control for very good overclocking stability.
As far as extra features goes, the ATA-100 Raid support is excellent and pretty easy to set up. In this case all you have to do for once is just follow the directions. No hiccups here. Keep in mind though that you'll get better hard disk performance if you run Windows 2000 because NTFS is a much better file system than FAT32. ATA-100 Raid is provided by using the Highpoint HPT370 chip. If you've seen any reviews on ATA-100 controllers you'll find that the HPT370 is at the top of most performance tests, especially the real world tests, in synthetic tests the Promise chip usually wins. So you will definitely have fast hard drive access with the KT7-Raid board.
Another unusal feature is the fan and heatsink on the KT133 northbridge. Now, I've noticed that a lot of chipsets to get hot, but does it warrant a fan? Most boards just have passive heatsinks, which get the job done. So does the fan lend to stability? I'm not really sure. I can say that it sure does look neat though, but beyond that I'm not positive if it really results in improved stability or performance.
Other things that are kinda cool are 2 additional USB Ports, via a seperate connector, and the thermal sensor right under the CPU. This position seems to be gaining popularity as it is also on the Asus A7V. The 3 DIMM slots support up to 1.5 GB of RAM and the board now supports the 1.2 Ghz Athlon.
That's all nice and all, but you might be wondering about performance. How does it stack up to the competition? Well, to say that it's not the fastest Socket A mobo isn't saying too much since you probably won't notice the difference. The fastest board out there appears still to be the Asus A7V. It too is a highly tweakable board, with jumpers to set the CPU multiplier (again assuming an unlocked CPU). Despite being edged out performance-wise I would still recommend the KT7-Raid based on it's features, obviously the ATA-100 Raid being a big boost. As any can tell you, system performance takes a serious hit when it the machine has to access a disk, basically anything outside of system memory. With ATA-100 Raid and some fast hard drives I think this really improves overall system performance more than a few points in a synthetic motherboard test.
With that said though, my current top 2 picks for Socket A motherboards are the Asus A7V and the Abit KT7-Raid and . Both are solid, reliable boards. If you're looking for some more features you'll definitely want to seriously consider the KT7-Raid, but if that's not your bag, then the A7V would be an excellent choice as well. The current crop of AMD motherboards is really good, you'd be happy with almost any of them. The market's matured much faster than I expected. VIA and the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers should be congratulated for making the Athlon, feature for feature, equal to or better than the Intel counterpart. The new competition has really generated a lot of great products from everyone: Intel, AMD, VIA and the motherboard manufacturers. With DDR chipsets and motherboards on the horizon you might also want to consider waiting until those are available, but if you need power now, you can't go wrong with AMD and Abit.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Zeorai
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Location: Irvine, CA.
Reviews written: 33
Trusted by: 14 members
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