Abit KT7A Motherboard

Pros: Cheap, reliable
Cons: Discontinued, poor support for Windows XP

I had this board for maybe a year, mostly running Windows 2000. I have had several problems with it, specifically when I would try to tweak the BIOS, the machine would hang, though the BIOS is supposed to specifically protect you from this. Though...

Pros: Very stable, no extra BS like on-board audio or video. Awesome BIOS-based overclocking ability.
Cons: Some heatsinks will not fit. SDRAM is getting replaced with DDR RAM

I've been putting my own systems together for about 10 years now, and pretty much this whole time I've been using nothing but ABIT motherboards. ABIT, to my knowledge, was the pioneer in BIOS-controled motherboard settings, finally eliminating all those...

Pros: Nice Bios
Cons: Bad capacitor placement causes HSF not to fit, Blows CPUs, Slightest OC'ing causes instability

Looks appealing with 6PCI slots, good overclocking. Don't be fooled, as a techie I thought this was the board of my dreams. This board blew 4 of my cpu's and I had to modify my Heatsink and fan (after 4 different kinds wouldn't fit). My friend also had one, it blew 2 of his cpus.

There are 2 capacitors next to the AGP slot that touch most video card heatsinks (WE THINK this may be the reason for blowing the CPUs).

On top of that the OverClocking abilities aren't really all that great, Even the slightest OC'ing caused instability in my system.

I had the Raid version of this board for over a jear, had some trouble with my sound-card (SoundBlaster Live 1024), after flashing the latest BIOS all worked ok. Running an Athlon 950 at 1150 MHz

With this motherboard Abit gave me more than I expected, being my mobo's PCB the v.1.3 I was able to upgrade to Athlom XP 1800 from the original Athlon 1Gb I started with.Good value for money! The memory FSB of 133 is not so bad to live with in everydays' use; still the bios options make a wonderful toy for overclockers. With Mushkin rev.3 I use a rock steady fsb of 150