Abit KD7A Motherboard

Pros: great chipset with wide range of supported CPU's and memory at a good price
Cons: Questionable layout, no fixed AGP/PCI ratio selection

A friend of mine from work recently had a bad experience with his computer where the system would simply shut down during normal operation. He bought it online and the warranty had just run out, so he brought it to me to see what I could find. I ...

Pros: 333 FSB, 8X AGP, LOW COST!
Cons: 6 channel audio needs tweaking, layout problems

This motherboard is a pleasure to own because it is good for overclocking, fast gaming, and supports fast FSB (333). I have an Athlon 2500+ XP which can easily do 2.0 GHz in this motherboard. Couple that with the 8x AGP and you have a pretty nice budget gaming system! I could'nt get the audio to work for some reason, I suspect the drivers Abit includes are crap, I might try it later with different drivers. Some layout issues include weird locations for connectors like the floppy and IDE ports.

Pros: Universal Serial Bus 2 works without any problem with Win 98
Cons: North bridge fan is cheap, eventually fails in a year of use.

I bought this mother board since I had to use Win98 in my home-built computer. I had no problems so far except the north bridge fan failed after 10 months of use. As I read from the web forums this is a very common problem with the north bridge fans. I replaced fan with a heat sink instead of a new fan, which I know will fail in another 10 months. The procedure is simple but a hassle. Actually the mother board should be re-screwed from its place in the case to do the extraction of the north bridge fan. I advise nobody to buy a mother board with a cheap north bridge fan on it.

Pros: price
Cons: highly conductive to metal

The first sign to avoid this product was at frys, out of the 15 on the shelves 14 were returns, I realized why when I tried to install it, the major problem is its highly conductive to metal, when I set it on a plastic bag it worked fine, but the second it was anywhere near the metal in the case it shut down, it does included anti conductive material to prevent this, but it does not work, I would strongly recomend not purchasing this