The Best Slot A (AMD Athlon) Motherboard
Written: Sep 18 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Has it all and more
Cons: None I have run into yet
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| Gr8ful's Full Review: Abit Slot A KA7-100 Motherboard |
This motherboard is a recent addition to my computer collection. It is designed with speed and expansion in mind. The board's features are cutting edge technology as far as Slot A style Athlon processors are concerned. I would prefer to have the Socket A Thunderbird, but since I already own the Slot A 800MHz Athlon I chose this board for it.
RAM Slots
The motherboard features 4 DIMM slots supporting up to 2GB of PC100/PC133 RAM. I may never use anywhere near that amount of RAM but I like to have the expandability. Some motherboards will not recognize DIMMs larger than 128MB or 256MB, but this board will recognize 512MB DIMMs.
Chipset
The chipset used on this board is the Apollo Pro KX133 by VIA with BIOS by Award. So far this is one of the more stable chipsets I have used with the Athlon processor. I didn't have to flash the BIOS for stability with my 800MHz processor like I had to with the Gigabyte 7IX motherboard. I simply plugged in my processor and the board recognized it without a hitch. Once I had Windows 98 SE installed, I installed the motherboard drivers for BUS Mastering and the AGP miniport drivers. After that all my hardware installations were a breeze.
On-board IDE
The on-board IDE controllers are one of the best features of this motherboard. You have Primary and Secondary ATA66 IDE controllers, as most boards do now, but you also have Primary and Secondary ATA100 IDE controllers as well. With the combination of the two, you could have a total of eight IDE devices controlled from this motherboard. This is excellent for people like me who can never have too many drives.
Expandability
The board has 1 AGP slot and 5 PCI slots. There is also a shared ISA/PCI slot. There are two USB ports on board and two more available with the addition of a USB motherboard cable attachment. With the use of both IDE controllers and considering the 4 memory slots, expandability on this board is extreme. My only limitation so far is financial. The motherboard will accept Athlon Slot A type processors from 500MHz up to 1 GHz.
Other Features
The board supports Wake-on-LAN, Wake-on-modem, ifrared, and supports up to three case fans. The board has an on-board power plug for the processor fan and has system health features in the BIOS that monitor fan speeds and processor temperature as well as overall system temperature.
Wrap up
This is by far the best motherboard out to date for the Slot A type Athlon processors. I cannot recommend this board strongly enough. Abit has done a wonderful job of putting everything I want on this board.
Recommended:
Yes
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