The very best slot A mobo, period.
Written: Sep 03 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Features, expandablity, power
Cons: More expensive then other slot A mobos
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| drewday's Full Review: Abit Slot A KA7-100 Motherboard |
Abit is a not the most famous of motherboard manufactures but they certainly make a great product!
Just about 2 months ago my P2 350 was showing signs of age… I had running in it a Voodoo 3500 card, SBL!, 128 megs of the good stuff, and two 8 gig udma/33 drives… Time to take a step I say to myself as I browse around for the best deals…
Truthfully at the time I was a die hard Intel fan, I had rooted on the P3 as it valiantly battled the Athlon in the past months, I turned my cheek at each review that had the Athlon come out on top. Naturally I was going to get a P3 Coppermine, right? Well, on a user on a relatively small budget of 1000 bucks I looked at the numbers…
Athlon 800 ~300
P3 800 ~750
Wow, AMD just sold me J .
After I finally decided that the Athlon was the way to go I just needed to find a mobo to support the beast. I initially looked at the Tyan mobo but eyes brought me up the list a bit… The KA7-100 just blew away all the other mobo’s on the page; 6 PCI slots, 4 dimm slots, 4 IDE channels, and supports udma/100.
Well, long story short I got the motherboard, and the processor eventually. My new system was to be:
KA7-100
Athlon 800
15 gig IBM deskstar (udma/100)
320 megs of pc-133
Voodoo 3500
SBL!
Diamond supra express
The system went together without a glitch.
This motherboard is POWER embodied in silicon. It represents the very best in what the KX-133 chipset can give you.
Like I said before the motherboard has 4 IDE channels, it does this with adding a Highpoint HPT 370 onto the board it self. It eliminates the need adding another IDE controller card and, to an extent, frees up one PCI slot because of that (partially because the controller shares an IRQ signal with PCI 5, you can use PCI 5 but the card has to support IRQ sharing.)
Adding to expandability the motherboard also has a USB header so you can easily add one of those USB brackets you find for pretty cheap to the back of your case and there you have 4 extra USB ports. Also you’ll find a rare 4 fan headers. The high voltage consumption of the Athlon processor makes these really handy and the inclusion of a thermal sensor for the processor makes this board all the more better.
Abit, legendary for overclockers and tweakers include the third version of the pretty much standard award BIOS which offers exceptional control of your system.
Of course features aren’t everything, if the system doesn’t work right they’re as valuable as the box it comes in. My particular system that I had noted above did indeed work without a glitch. I did have one problem though, I couldn’t set the memory bus to 133, my video card just wouldn’t work. A problem for some but I don’t plan on keeping the Voodoo 3500 in for much longer so I should be able to kick the memory to it’s true operating potential, I’ll have an update when I go swap it out.
The last thing that I can really mention is the soft wear and such. On the CD you find all the drivers you need for the Highpoint controller, the chipset features, and some other nice add ons like the VIA hard wear monitor soft wear that lets you see the current system temp, processor tem, fan rpm, and current voltages throughout the system.
I must say that before this I was neither a big fan of VIA or AMD but this whole experience has converted me… Overall this is an excellent buy and as far as I’m concerned this the slot A Athlon motherboard to end all boards. If you want the very best look no further!
-Drew
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
drewday
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Member: Drew DiPietro
Location: NY
Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
A University Student in Manhattan
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