Great board, but I wouldn't call the installation easy
Written: Mar 31 '01 (Updated Aug 14 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very stable, latest features (UDMA 100) & softmenu III for overclocking-which works very well
Cons: Not an easy installation. Avoid soundblaster Live in this board. VIA usb controller troublesome
The Bottom Line: Stable board with recent technology for slot a processors. Overclocking softmenu III. Not a project for the novice without experienced help. Minor issues with Radeon, Soundblaster Live causes lockups.
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| suemccartin's Full Review: Abit Slot A KA7-100 Motherboard |
I've been building computers for many years and I've seen many installations that were smooth and many that weren't. This board was one that wasn't smooth. According to the sticker on the side of one of the connectors this is a revision 1 board, I don't know if there are later revisions out. I wanted this board for the updated udma 100 controller and the bios overclocking utilities. I've seen many reports of easy overclocking just using the Softmenu III utilities built into the bios on this board. It also has an extensive selection of fast side bus settings accessed through a bank of dip switches (why I don't know, the FSB is also selectable in the bios).
This board is a big one, if you've got a smaller case it may not fit, either take your case with you to the store or be sure you can return the board if it won't fit in your stock ATX case (of course you can also resign yourself to buying a new case as well).
Most of us who regularly rebuild our computers have simply come to expect that Microsoft Windows simply must be completely reinstalled to avoid problems cropping up later when changing a motherboard. I was hoping that since my old board had the same chipset I might get away without installing windows again here. Well I almost did it. Windows ran fine until I updated the motherboard bios and then it decided to crap out completely (with the usual frozen at bootups etc.) Here is where the fun starts.
My newest, largest hard drive is a 30 gig Maxtor UDMA 100 drive. I also have an a 20 gig udma 100 drive and a dvd player and a cdburner. Desiring to get the most out of my new drive I was running it off the built-in udma 100 highpoint controller. This was the first obstacle I had to get around when doing a fresh install of windows 98. While the highpoint controller is built into the board, the board bios does not see it as a built in controller, it treats it more like an add in card. (also note that if you need to update your drive bios or use a utility to set the dma mode that your utility probably won't be able to see a drive on the highpoint controller--I had to put my udma 100 drives on a primary connector before the maxtor utilities could see them.)
When the machine boots you see a listing of drives, but only those that are on the primary IDE1/IDE2 connectors (the highpoint connectors are labeled IDE3/IDE4). The information you get at boot time is pitiful if you ask me. After the memory post, you basically get the name of the hard drive and the bios serial number and date, memory speed isn't listed as with my old Epox board.
On this board the default bios settings assume that you have only one hard drive, it does not autodetect the secondary drives on each channel, you must go into the bios setup and manually turn on support for the secondary drive on the primary cable and both devices on the secondary cable, this will also allow the controller to list your cdrom drives at boot up. This one drove me a bit nuts because most motherboards automatically detect when you add drives and it isn't necessary to turn anything on in the bios. Abit could improve this a bit if you ask me.
Note: This board is somewhat picky about cdrw/cdrom devices. I guess I just lucked out that my old Phillips cdrw and Pioneer 10x DVD worked ok on the same cable. I have since tried replacing the pioneer with a creative DVD and the motherboard wouldn't have it-it seemed to kind of work as master by itself but nothing slaved to it would work. I took the Creative back and tried a new TDK 16x10x40X burner and I lost my slave drive on the first cable when I tried to slave my Pioneer DVD to it. These are classic IDE fights, the motherboard bios would seem to need some improvements in this area as I've never seen so many different brands fight with one another.
During boot up, a separate screen pops up for the highpoint controller to list drives hooked up to it. The bios for this board lists many boot options, including boot from cdrom (from the main controller IDE1 or IDE2). Note that this bios calls your first ide drive ide0 (or HDD zero)this varies with different products. I know I've had boards in the past that started with one (1) not zero and the latest versions of FDISK number your drives from 1 (can we get any more confusing). Zero is actually the more acurate description because the bios hardware sees your drives as zero and one on each cable. When you adjust your bios settings for boot order make sure you've chosen HDD-0 if you have two drives on the main cable, otherwise the machine will freeze at bootup (because it can't find the system to start with).
It should be noted that for the initial installation I disabled the highpoint controller in the bios. It is always a good idea to make your system as simple as possible when installing windows, ie pull every card except the video card and add your other toys in one at a time after you've got windows running.
It should be noted that windows does not like you to change drive configurations. The way your drives are when it's installed, is the way it always wants to see them or you could have problems installing software and drivers. I have also found that if you have two cdrom devices, such as a regular cdrom and a dvd or burner that windows will often not install properly until you disconnect one of the cdrom devices from the system so I also left my burner out of the system for the installation.
If you do not have a newer windows 98 cdrom that is bootable, you will need a boot floppy to get to the point that you can install windows. Be aware, if you try to start a windows 98 installation with a 95 boot disk you'll get typical microsoft cryptic messages about the wrong system version etc. blah blah. Make yourself a system floppy with a copy of format, fdisk, mscdex, and a basic config.sys and autoexec.bat files from your working 98 installation, or one of a friend. I basically just took an old 95 boot floppy and updated the files on it so it works. It also apparently works to let windows make you a startup disk, 98 apparently loads the cdrom drivers for dos and will set them up for you too.(You can do this through control panel if you don't have a startup disk). Be aware that you will need a ps/2 keyboard and mouse to install windows as due to some usb keyboard support issues on this board, windows probably won't be able to see your usb keyboard or mouse during the installation.
After booting with the floppy I changed to the cd drive letter and typed startup to start the installation. Windows tests your drive for errors and available space before it starts writing files. It takes about the 60 minutes they claim to load it and you'll need your serial number off your manual at one point in the installation before it will finish loading.
It is apparently pretty important what order you load drivers on this chipset. When windows pops up for the first time the very first thing you want to load are the via drivers that come with the motherboard on a cdrom. On this board there are two drivers to install, the VIA 4-in-1 package and the separate driver for the highpoint controller. Note that you should check for newer drivers off the internet as the ones that come on the cdrom can often be quite dated. I found a much more recent driver for the highpoint controller.
Install the via 4-in-1 first, then second install your video card drivers. Third exit out to your bios and turn the highpoint controller back on in the bios and then let windows boot back up so you can install the driver for the highpoint controller. If you want to use the highpoint controller, the drivers should now be installed so you can shut down and put your c drive on the highpoint controller(i.e. you have to move your cables around). If you want to use the highpoint controller for your c: drive, you must additionally change the boot order in the bios so that the drives on that controller will be addressed first. This board has 4 settings for boot order, I set boot first to floppy, boot second to furtureATA and boot third to cdrom there is an additional boot other selection in here that I can't conceive of a purpose for.
Note: IF YOU ARE PLANNING TO USE THE HIGHPOINT FOR YOUR C: DRIVE MAKE POSITIVELY SURE THAT YOU DON'T HAVE ANY CREATIVE LABS SOUNDBLASTER LIVE DRIVERS LOADING IN WINDOWS. I've found that the card itself and the drivers must be completely removed from the registry or you won't be able to use the highpoint controller. The uninstall utility for the Live is useless you must go through the registry manually and rip out all references to the Creative soundcard.
Now that I managed to get windows loaded I have begun reloading my system. As I knew would happen, because I changed my drives around I have to type the new letter of the cd drive when installing drivers and software because windows still thinks it's where it was before I added the other drive back in. I.e. the new drive letter doesn't even show up as a choice in the windows installer, you have to type it in manually--microsoft must be aware of this, like so many things they never bother to fix because they have such a corner on the market.
There were three additional hitches I ran into. One involved the internet connection wizard, the second has to do with USB keyboards, and the third was with my relatively new Radeon video card. The way this board handles a usb keyboard in dos seems pretty poor. My old epox board had no problems with the usb keyboard in dos but with this motherboard the keyboard often doesn't work if you're trying to do something like flash the bios from a dos prompt. There are two choices in the bios for a usb keyboard, OS or BIOS, I found that activating the bios selection corrupted the screen in dos to the point that I couldn't read it when trying to do a flash (this is a problem with the Radeon, the problem went away when I put my old rage fury pro back in the system). In fairness this could be caused by my Radeon video card which would seem to have some minor issues with this board for right now--it's a new card which is understandable.
For now I'd advise avoiding a usb keyboard with this motherboard at least until after you've got windows loaded. Hook up your mouse and keyboard while you've got windows running so it will detect them and install the drivers, if you simply try to remove your ps/2 mouse and keyboard and then reboot, windows will not detect a mouse and you won't be able to start windows. If you don't load windows with a modem installed, the internet connection wizard doesn't work so you can set up your internet. Fortunately windows leaves a large installer folder on your hard drive and you can start installations of any previously downloaded microsoft products there to solve that issue.
The third problem I mentioned is with my Radeon video card, the VIA chipset is known for not producing enough signal for many of the hottest new video cards. In the bios is a setting for "agp driving value," you'll need to experiment with this setting to see which one stops unexplained freezes on your system. I started with DA which worked on my other kx133 board but that was not the setting for the ka7-100, so far the BA selection is doing the trick for me. You have many choices of driving value but I've found that the ones ending in A, BA, CA, DA, seem to work the best. As I mentioned above I also had a problem with the VIA AGP to CPU Controller under system devices having a hardware conflict with the VIA harddrive controller--it would seem that either the Radeon bios or the motherboard bios needs a little updating.
This is a good product that needs some small fixes to make it wonderful. Its related brother product the ka7 also has a great reputation. This is a good stable board that is kind of tough to install if you want to use a UDMA100 drive as the C: drive in your system. I found that the Highpoint controller is not useable when my Creative Labs Soundblaster Live Platinum was installed in the system. Even removing the Live card didn't stop the problem, it was necessary to remove all traces of the drivers from the registry (manually, the uninstaller is useless) before I could use the Highpoint without windows constantly freezing at startup. The overclocking utilities built into the bios have a good reputation for ease of use although I haven't tried them yet. I'll post more here as I get more experience with the board.
4-20-01 update: Had the board for a little while now and I have to comment on how stable it is. I've been slowly converting a ton of large .avi and .mov video files to mpeg 1 files that will run on a standard dvd player and with the fairly slow software utility I've got it easily takes an hour or more to convert a 40 minute movie over to the mpeg format. While converting all these movies, I've let the machine run for three days straight without a single freezeup the whole time. My old epox was stable, but right now I'd rate this board as even more stable. I haven't yet played with the overclocking utilities but that is next on my list.
Overclocking Addendum 4-21-2001: Well today I got brave and decided to play with the softmenu III overclocking system built into the board's bios. Before playing in here I looked around at all the sites to glean all the advice I could about what bios settings to use when overclocking. The first lesson I learned is that ATI's current drivers for the Radeon do not like an overclocked sysytem (even after returning the system to normal settings the Radeon would not allow windows to startup, the drivers must have gotten corrupted somehow during the testing), I had to pull the radeon and put my old rage fury pro back into the sytem before windows would startup properly.
I have found settings to get my stock 850 slot A cpu running at 995 mhz but they make an unstable system. I've found that Fast side bus settings above 117 make for an unstable system and windows usually produces registry errors. Most oc sites claim you probably can't raise the sidebus much above 115 without problems. This board is unusual because it not only allows you to alter the fsb and pci bus speeds, it also has an additional setting that will allow you to raise the fsb without raising the pci clock!!!! As an experience overclocker knows, PCI cards are designed to run at 33mhz, they often get finicky or refuse to work if the pci clock gets much over 35mhz. On this board the USB ports will usually stop working completely if you push the side bus too high.
When overclocking you must have the following excellent hardware pieces:
1-A good high quality fan, slot A fans come in single and double fans, I have an AAVID dual fan (that cost about $30.00 when I got my first board) and so far it seems able to keep my oc'd processor sufficiently cool. I've since upgraded to a Global Win product that has larger fans and seems to do a better job of keeping the cpu cool.
2-A good quality power supply. I have a zippy usa product that can produce 20 amps on the 3.3 v branch of the power supply. If you have a marginal supply it may not be able to handle the extra load of oc'ing your system because voltages must sometimes be pushed a tiny bit higher to keep the cpu running properly at higher speeds than it was designated to run at.
3-Good quality sdram. If you've got generic ram you can probably forget it because it won't be able to handle the extra speed. PC 133 sdram is designed to run at busclock +33(some bios says hclk+pciclk). In a non-oc'd system this would result in 133 mhz (normal bus is 100 mhz plus pci bus speed of 33 mhz) that it is designed to run at. In an oc'd system you are raising the fsb and possibly the pciclock also, pushing your memory to a faster speed than it was designed to handle. My Micron pc33 128 meg ram sticks are running faster than they were designed for because of the fsb settings that are used to overclock the cpu. Most memory is cas 3 unless you paid a lot for it. If you can afford the extra expense for cas 2 rated memory then get it. Cas 2 memory will be able to take the overclocking better because it is faster to begin with and can always be set to run at cas 3 in a heavily overclocked system.
4-Good quality cpu. Just because your buddy down the street was able to push his cpu to about 150mhz over rated specs doesn't mean you'll get the same results. Many overclockers have commented that the same cpu manufactured at different plants will have varying results when overclocking. This is probably due to production standards and perhaps to some of the components (such as the cpu cache memory) inside the Slot A cpu case.
While I've found softmenu III settings for 995 mhz., the system isn't stable. I think I may need some better cooling. Currently the system is running stably at 952 mhz but I'm worried about the cpu temperature at 84 degrees (according to the software in windows and the system temperature of 93 degrees, which is probably closer to 100 in reality). Most oc newgroups advise that as long as you can keep the temperature a few degrees under 40 degrees celsius then you should not be endangering your cpu. Too much heat causes the materials that your cpu is made of to break down on a molecular level so that soon or later it will no longer conduct electricity in the circuit paths and will cease to function.
Softmenu III settings to oc an 850 slot A athlon to 952 mhz. 112x8.5
cpu operating speed=user define
(multiplier factor cannot be adjusted with softmenu III)
-cpu fsb/pci clock=103/34mhz
-cpu fsb plus mhz=9
-speed error hold=disabled
cpu power supply=user define
-core voltage=1.7 (default, don't change this)(if the system is unstable try raising it to 1.8 but no more)
-I/O voltage=3.40 (default is 3.30, this helps with stability if you have a fully loaded system-try default first)
-fast cpu command decode=normal (default)
-cpu L2 cache ID=default
-Cpu pull up strength=3 (default)
-CPU Drive Strength=2 (default)
-DRAM clock=hclk+pciclk
-Auto Detect DIMM/PCICLK=Enabled
-Spread Spectrum Modulated=Disabled (this setting often causes problems in oc'd systems, turn it off).
The above settings produce a system that reads like this at bootup
cpu speed=952 Mhz. FSB 112X8.5
So far my system seems to be stable at around 100 mhz of additional speed.
I will post here in a few days after I've had more time to judge exactly how stable the system is when oc'd so much, I may be able to tweak a bit more speed out of it once I get a better fan for the cpu.
Update: 5-22-2001 I've been fighting with the occasional freeze to a high pitched whine (emanating from the speakers). I've had varying opinions on what this is from the cpu can't take the oc to the memory that can't take being oc'd. In frustration I removed all the oc settings and left everything standard and it still does it occasionally after the machine's been on for awhile but only in games. Been reading much from folks who claim that the popular soundblaster Live Value or Platinum cards do not get along well with Via chipset motherboards. There have been reports of crackling and freezeups caused by the live but I've never encountered the crackling problem on this motherboard. Some folks claim it is the software and drivers that cause the problem while others tend to blame the hardware itself to a greater degree. To test, I plopped a cheap, but adequate, Guillemot Muse sound card in here to see if the freezes go away. Just got off a gaming session and didn't get a freeze but only time will tell if it's really gone or not.
I also tried to put a 900 slot a t-bird on this board today and it wouldn't even boot up at all. After I bought the cpu I heard that t-birds up to 800 only usually work and some people are able to get 900's to work but apparently not me (unless of course my cpu is bad which is a possibility). The KX133 chipset is supposed to be virtually identical to the newer KT133 chipset which is designed to work with the socket A t-birds. It would seem that there should be some way to make a tbird work with this chipset but there apparently is no financial incentive for anyone to do so. The AMD 751 chipset only officially supports the t-bird so I guess I'm stuck buying yet another motherboard, case and memory. ASUS makes a K7V-T motherboard that has some kind of hardware update to make it work with the T-bird but they are not for sale in the USA and can only be purchased from foreign companies (seems to be widely available in Germany for some reason).
5-28 update: Well the Soundblaster Live has been out of the machine for days and haven't had a single lock after pulling several all day Diablo II gaming sessions. I've also put the oc settings back in and am running the 850 processor up at 980 for several hours straight with no problems. I miss my Souncblaster Live soundcard it sounds great, but I can't put up with the constant lockups it causes on this motherboard. I hope that Creative fixes this problem soon. Further note: Not only does the live cause lockups, it's apparently somehow incompatible with the highpoint controller as well, now that it's out of the system the highpoint seems to be working just fine where it would make windows lock when the Live card/drivers are in the system. I hope that ABIT and highpoint crawl on Creative hard until they fix the problems with their soundcard.
update 6-8-2001: I have noticed that occasionally this motherboard displays a tendency to reassign resources without apparent reason. One day everything is up and running and getting along famously with each other and the next day the usb ports are knocked out. Being that I use a usb mouse and keyboard this presents a problem. As I noted above, adjacent slots tend to share resources and I've found it necessary to use the bios settings to manually assign IRQ's to pci slots to avoid problems. The USB ports are finicky and if you can manage to get the usb controller on it's own irq then you should have fewer problems. When the usb controller shares with something else the usb ports sometimes aren't working when windows comes up. This has only started since the highpoint controller was activated and used for the c drive, I don't know if it's got anything to do with this issue or not. I also finally found the cause of the problem I was having with entering control panel in safe mode. It is sometimes necessary to enter safe mode and delete old copies of drivers for hardware that is no longer in the system as this can sometimes cause strange problems. While the soundblaster live and its drivers were loaded on the system I couldn't enter the control panel without the system immediately rebooting, now that the Live is out of the system I have no problems entering safe mode. I guess there really must be something to the theory that it is incompatible with VIA boards. I only hope they fix it soon.
update 6-11-01: For some reason, suddenly no matter what I do the usb controller kicks out if the mouse and keyboard are both hooked to the usb bus, this used to only happen occasionally now it's happening on every boot. I know the via usb controllers are supposed to cause a lot of problems but I used this same keyboard and mouse combination on my old epox board with the same chipset (and presumably the same controller) and had no problems. I would say that ABIT needs to do a lot of work on the usb controller probably through a bios update. USB 2.0 is out and is quite different from 1.1 in terms of the number of devices it supports and bus speed. Tonight I went out an bought an add in usb 2.0 card and shut off the internal usb to see if that helps the problems I've been having. The only problem with a usb add in card is that it offers no usb support in dos. So, keep a ps2 keyboard around if you need to change your bios settings. At least my keyboard and mouse don't drop out when windows boots anymore.
Update 6-25-2001: Been going around and around trying to find cas 2, 256K memory chips that will work properly in this board. I tried a pair of micron boards first, the machine ran ok a little while then refused to boot, then went to a pair of Infineon boards, the system will run and usually trash the windows registry, in order to get the system stable DRAM BANK Interleave had to be disabled in the bios, neither 4 way or 2 way will work and causes freezes and no boots. This setting has much to do with memory performance. I'm guessing that ABIT has some work to do on their bios--as usual they've not bothered to answer my emails on the matter. I'm hearing that Hyundai memory works well in this board (last time I check the cheapie PNY memory sold by compusa was using Hyundai chips), I guess I get to exchange these for Hyundai and see what happens. I had no problems like this with my 128K cas 3 chips, they run at 4 way bank interleave and I have no problems. A NOTE on memory speeds: on this board the manual tries hard to make you believe that using only the fsb+ settings in the smartmenu III bios leaves your bus speed and pci bus speed unaffected--this isn't true it does indeed affect your agp and pci bus speeds. If you use the fsb+ setting to oc your processor you will probably have to leave your pc133 memory set to Hclock in the bios and not hclock+pciclock which is normaly used to obtain pc133 memory speeds. I.e. if you've got your fsb+ setting at 15 and the regular bus at 100 then your memory speed is probably 115 (if you set it to hclock+pciclock your memory would be overclocked to 148 (115+33), which most sticks won't take well.
8-2001 update: I'm sick of this thing. Ditched it for a new gigabyte GA7DXR with a socket A chip and AMD761/VIA 686B chipset. That board was a dream to install and runs like a top, not like this ornery bugger.
complaints about the KA7-100:
1-Incompatible with soundblaster live. You can't use it in the board, it causes freezes and don't try to use the highpoint controller with the live in the board, windows won't even boot. When the live is in the system you can't enter control panel from safe mode, the system reboots every time.
2-Really crappy USB controller. Forget dos support for usb mice and keyboard, it just don't work well, if at all. Like another kx133 board I've owned, when I turn on the parallel printer while the usb is in use it will often knock out the keyboard and usb mouse. Often, too often to be simply an annoyance, the system comes up without the usb keyboard and it must be unplugged and plugged in again before it will work. I even tried disabling the onboard USB controller and putting in an add-in card, no difference. The mouse connected to the keyboard doesn't do this, just the keyboard. To test I went and bought a new usb keyboard and it displayed the same behaviour.
3-Adjacent slots share resources. What a pain in the butt!!! Irq allocation is troublesome on this board and it never assigns irq 3 or 4 even though the serial ports are disabled. The bios likes to assign everything on one or two irq's and never puts anything on 9 even when it's free.
4-Mysteriously reassigning resources. Occasionally a stable and functioning system will suddenly reassign system resources for no apparent reason. Usually this doesn't cause a problem unless you've got some quirky hardware like I do.
5-Abit doesn't answer tech support emails and doesn't staff their usenet groups. This is a big minus if you ask me. They also haven't released a bios update for this thing in a year.
6-Can't seem to find 256K cas 2 chips that will work in the board. This may be a chipset issue but ABIT seems to be doing nothing to address the issue or warn folks to avoid them.
The board was a good idea that needs a lot of work. I like the board and I'm not sorry I bought it but I think I'll find some old components to put in it and palm it off on someone without as many toys in their system.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 153.00
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Epinions.com ID:
suemccartin
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Location: Florida, USA
Reviews written: 290
Trusted by: 36 members
About Me:
Been building computers for 10+ years. I work to support my computer habit.
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