Is the performance increase worth sacrificing stability?
Written: Mar 07 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Hardware Raid at a low cost
Cons: Has stability problems with Windows 2000 and certain PCI cards
The Bottom Line: The hardware RAID gives a performance boost, but has problems with other cards and isn't stable in Windows 2000. Ask yourself: Is an unstable computer worth the performance increase?
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| MooRogue's Full Review: Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard |
This review covers the Abit KT7A-RAID board, a newer revision of their KT7-RAID board which improves the onboard IDE controller.
I built a system with the KT7A-RAID motherboard only because of the hardware IDE Raid controller. I needed a PC for Digital Video editing, but did not want to pay the premium of buying SCSI disks. A single EIDE hard disk could not capture video fast enough from the IEEE 1394 (aka Firewire aka i.Link) connection from a DV Camcorder, but two disks in a Raid 0 configuration could. Unfortunately, the KT7-RAID motherboard's onboard Highpoint Raid controller had some other ideas.
For starters, Windows 2000 with ACPI enabled decide to put the highpoint Raid controller, the Creative Soundblaster Live!, and the Pinnacle MicroDV 500 Plus cards all on the same IRQ. Now these are all supposedly well-behaved PCI cards that can share IRQs, but in practice, the end result is random crashes where the system simply hangs and does not come back, not even a blue screen. This seems to happen randomly, either when the computer first boots, after it has been sitting idle for a while, or during some CPU or hard disk intensive activity. One thing is consistant, I wasn't able to get the machine to stay up for more then 6 hours with ACPI enabled.
Using Paul's Unofficial ABIT KT7 FAQ (http://www.apushardware.com/faqs/kt7faq/kt7faq.htm I was able to figure out how to disable ACPI during the initial Windows 2000 installation process (press F5 or F7 during the installation when it asks if you want to specify a disk driver) and reinstall the operating system. After disabling ACPI and installing using the "Standard PC" configuration, the system has turned out to be much more stable. I highly recommend that you read the unofficial FAQ before you decide to purchase this motherboard.
One other minor problem is that there are quite a few capicators next to the CPU socket. This pretty much prevents you from putting a large heat sink on the socket as the capicators will get in the way, unless you are able to delicately bend them out of the way. The AMD retail Athlon fan will work with the socket, but unfortunately, my vendor had run into a bad batch of CPU fans with the boxed retail versions of the CPU (surprise surprise!), so I had to squeeze a thermatake cooler between the capicators onto the chip instead.
Still, the KT7-Raid motherboard is a good board considering the performance gain you get for a little more money. If you are looking for the best performance that you can get, while spending as little money as possible, and stability isn't a big issue for you, this might be the motherboard for you. I would not use the KT7-RAID as a mission-critical server.
Overall, even though I eventually managed to bring this motherboard to a stable configuration, I think the hassle that you have to go through in order to debug these instability problems is not worth the trouble. At the end of the day, ask yourself if the performance gain is really worth having a stable computer. If this is the first computer that you are building, I recommend that you look at some other boards that are more stable. From personal experience, I've built computers using the Abit BP6, BE6, and even the KT7, and a Epox board without the kind of stability problems that the KT7A-Raid has been showing.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 148
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Epinions.com ID:
MooRogue
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Location: SF Bay Area, California
Reviews written: 17
Trusted by: 4 members
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