Nice Simple Motherboard
Written: Apr 10 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Basic Motherboard with no on-board devices
Simple setup - Good Manual
No Jumpers
Cons: I/O Shield Bracket doesn't match exactly
No RAID
The Bottom Line: An Excellent bare bones motherboard without all of the extras found on most current motherboards. Great manual, easy setup, and very stable. This board has no RAID capability.
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| Joe_R's Full Review: Abit KD7-E Motherboard |
I just put together two systems with this motherboard about four months ago. I had originally purchased one for the system I was building. I was so impressed, I purchased another one for my son's computer. I've been very happy with this motherboard, it was easy to set up and get running, and it's been very stable so far.
The manual is very well written. It takes you through installation and setup in very clear steps with plenty of pictures and diagrams. Installation is fairly straight forward. This board has 6 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, 4 DIMM Slots, 2USB 2.0 ports on the back, 1 parallel port, 2 serial ports, and PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors. It also comes with a connector to add four more USB ports, two of which can be mounted in the card slots in the back, the other two I connected to the front of the case. My only complaint is the I/O shield bracket that Abit provides does not match the I/O connector layout. It has additional holes for a sound card which is not part of this board. The bracket fits, it just has extra holes. I guess I'm just being picky.
All of the motherboard functions are set through the BIOS instead of jumpers. This board appears to have several settings for overclocking, though I haven't tried them.
The reason I chose this particular board is that it doesn't have any on board devices such as audio, video and ethernet. The other reason is that it still has the "legacy" ports on it. The latest and greatest motherboards are coming only with USB ports. I still have a few devices which use the parallel and serial ports, and I didn't want to have to go out and buy additional USB to serial/parallel converters. Also, having seperate audio and video provides better performance than the usual on-board devices.
I am currently running this board with an AMD XP2100 CPU, 512mb 2100 ram, ATI Radeon 9000 Video card, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card, and a LinkSys Ethernet card under XP Professional. So far, everything is working fine, and I haven't had any issues with the hardware. I would definitely recommend this board.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 87.00
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Epinions.com ID:
Joe_R
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Location: Rochester, NY
Reviews written: 34
Trusted by: 4 members
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