The mother of all motherboards...
Written: Oct 16 '00 (Updated Oct 16 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Nice layout, loaded with features, RAID support, ATA100, AGP4x, jumperless, can set clock speed in BIOS!
Cons: A touch pricy, in the $150 range
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| hingeswift's Full Review: Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard |
I recently received an order for a high end Athlon workstation from a customer who wanted "the best performance available for the money." Since the heart of any system is its motherboard/chipset, you'd better start with a good one. Abit is renowned for their excellent, full-featured, well thought out motherboards, and the Abit KT7-RAID is an excellent motherboard even among this cadre.
The features on this motherboard are surpassed by none; rivaled only by the Asus A7V, and that is still a good notch or two below the KT7-RAID. The KT7-RAID is based on the VIA KT133 chipset, VIA's initial Socket-A interface chipset with southbridge support for PC133 SDRAM - that is 133MHz memory for the layman. This chipset supports both the AMD Athlon Thunderbird and the AMD Duron processors.
The KT7 series of motherboards feature six PCI slots - no AMR or CMR slots (just as it should be for a high-end motherboard!) and a single shared ISA slot. This provides plenty of expansion for us power users and just a touch of legacy support for those strange ones among us who would insert an old ISA card into a brand new Athlon system. It takes all kinds! Inherent to the KT133 chipset, the KT7 series also supports AGP4x video for running your very expensive Geforce/Voodoo/Radeon video cards to their limits.
The KT7 series motherboards are entirely jumperless - all settings are handled from the SoftMenu3 within the BIOS. This includes core clock speed. That's right, you can overclock your processor from within the BIOS. This board is an overclocker's dream - for that matter, it is a system builder's dream.
The layout of the board is very well thought out. The processor is located in an accessible but out of the way place up near the power supply, and none of the cables interfere with the card slots in any way. The only issue I had was getting to the DIMM sockets after the IDE cables are plugged in, but how often will the average user be adding/removing memory chips? The board must run a bit hot at times, because this one had a heatsink/fan on the chipset. I would recommend (as for all Athlon systems) a case with a 300W power supply and a case fan for good measure. Of course, the system monitors its own temperature and the processor core temperature as well as the fan RPMs - all of which will set off system warnings as specified by the user if any readings exceed tolerances.
The really "above and beyond" feature of the KT7-RAID is, as the name suggests, the incorporation of the High Point HTP370 IDE RAID controller. Anyone who has supported a server environment knows what RAID is, although most home users probably do not. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and is just what the name implies. RAID configurations require multiple hard drives (make them identical!) in order to provide performance gains, redundant security, or both. The High Point RAID controller supports two configurations - RAID0 and RAID1 (sorry, no RAID5 here!) RAID0 is disk striping, which will simultaneously write even and odd packets on different disks. This effectively provides double the read/write rate of a single hard drive. RAID1 is mirroring, which writes an exact copy of one hard drive to another. This will keep you operating normally if one of your hard drives fails. The obvious problem is that if you buy two 30GB hard drives and run them in a RAID1 configuration, you will only have 30GB of storage - not 60GB. There is also a RAID0+1 configuration available, which clearly combines the two techniques - requiring four identical hard drives. Furthermore, the IDE channels support Ultra-ATA100, which provides a 100MB/Sec data transfer rate - 50% faster than ATA66.
If you are in the market for an Athlon system, this is presently the only way to go. If you can wait a while, the new chipsets with DDR (double data rate) SDRAM support will be available from VIA, AMD, and ALI. When they are available, I will certainly give Abit's offering a good look.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
hingeswift
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Reviews written: 19
Trusted by: 15 members
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