A excellent motherboard for AMD processors.
Written: Feb 15 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Filled with robust features. Abit quality.
Cons: Performance comes with a price.
The Bottom Line: Excellent features, excellent performance.
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| JoroJr's Full Review: Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard |
For the past few years Abit, a company based in Taiwan, has continually produced some of the best motherboards for Intel's line of processors. The Abit BE6 and BH6 were an overclocker's dream come true when you wanted to push the stock Celeron's speed to that upper tier. Arguably the greatest feature of these motherboard's bios is the soft menu. It allows you to take any multiplier locked processor and push it by adjusting its front side bus. Intel didn't foresee end users using faster 100 Mhz SDRAM and adjusting the front side bus to get a higher clock speed.
Fast forward a few years, and now the Socket-A Athlon and Duron processors are readily available in the market. Let us look at the features of the KT7-RAID motherboard:
Socket A - Supports both Athlon Thunderbird and Duron processors. Both chips have the best price to performance ratio thus far.
VIA Apollo KT133 chipset - The chipset supports faster system and memory busses. In other words, both 133 Mhz SDRAM and 100 Mhz SDRAM are supported.
HPT370 chipset - This chip is the Ultra ATA-100 controller. There is no need to add a secondary controller card into the system if you have a hard drive that supports this feature. It also supports hard drives that are Ultra DMA 33 and 66.
RAID feature - Raid stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It requires two identical hard drives at the least.
Raid 0 is known as striping. In simple terms, your data is spread between the two drives. The drives read and write in parallel thus increasing performance. If one drive crashes...you lose all your data.
Raid 1 is known as mirroring. Information stored on one drive is stored identically on the other. This creates a back up of your information.
The ideal Raid solution is 0+1. This however, requires four hard drives. Not very economical, but if you run a small business, this may prove to be an interesting setup.
IDE channels - The KT7 Raid gives you four IDE channels. Two of the channels, Channels 3 and 4, support the ATA-100 drives, and channels 1 and 2 support slower drives. Having four IDE channels is a great feature. I have never run into a problem of picky drives wanting to be a master or slave. All four drives in my system are masters of their own channels (CD-ROM, CDR-W, DVD-ROM, IBM GXP Ultra ATA 100 Hard Drive).
Soft Menu III - As previously mentioned, this has got be one of the greatest aspect of the motherboard. It lets the end user adjust the front side bus of the system by increments of 1 Mhz. Ideally you continually bump up the system to your desired speed until it becomes stable.
Other features of the notable features of the KT7 are:
- 4x AGP support
- Three SDRAM memory banks
- 6 PCI, 1 ISA port. The sixth PCI and ISA slot is on a shared bus. In other words, you can use either six PCI devices or 5 PCI devices and 1 ISA device.
- 4 USB ports. Two are the standard ports located next to the mouse and keyboard ports. The other two ports require a cable that is connected to the ports located next to the battery. The ports are then placed in a slot cover that is usually taken up by a PCI or ISA card.
As one can deduce, the KT7 RAID is packed with features. Does the average user need these extra features? No, but it is nice to have when you need them. Currently I'm running an 900 Mhz Thunderbird, and am very happy with the motherboard. I currently have the following components installed in my system:
- Gainward Geforce 2 GTS
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live
- 3com 10/100 Base-T ethernet card
- Hauppage WinTv Go tuner
- Iomega Zip CD
- Pioneer 16x DVD Rom Drive
- Mitsumi 48x CD Rom Drive
- Mitsumi 3.5" Floppy Drive
- IBM Deskstar 30-gig GXP Hard Drive
With these components, I have yet to experience any compatibility issues. The Abit KT7-Raid is a solid motherboard. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to put together an Athlon Thunderbird or Duron system.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 150
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Epinions.com ID:
JoroJr
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Location: Kansas, Bah
Reviews written: 25
Trusted by: 6 members
About Me:
College forgot to teach me one thing: the real world sucks.
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