KT7 is a tweakers delight!
Written: Jan 07 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very powerful and easy to use
Cons: No ATA/100
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| merc13's Full Review: Abit KT7 Motherboard |
I purchased the Abit KT7 at the same time I purchased my Duron 700, both and a generic HSF set me back ~$240 shipped. The KT7 alone would then be about $130 of that. I consider this (and the Duron 700) one of my smartest purchases ever. With the Abit KT7 motherboard and its wonderful SoftBIOS technology I have reached 1055mhz with the Duron 700 and optimal memory performance. (Which helps boost my Quake 3 FPS) The 1055mhz also puts out 3.7Mkeys/sec in RC5! The KT7 also has an ISA slot for legacy ISA modems for use in Linux and to save CPU cycles.
Granted, the KT7 is lacking the ATA/100 RAID that its big brother the KT7-RAID has, but I simply do not have enough money for two hard drives to RAID. If I did, I certainly would have spent the extra ~$20 for the KT7-RAID as that amount of money is certainly worth ATA/100 RAID. It would have been nice if they had included ATA/100 though. As I have heard that if you have one of the new ATA/100 drives, having the actual ATA/100 controller will improve burst rate. That would be nice as I received a 45GB IBM 75GXP for Christmas, but at least ATA/100 controllers are relatively cheap.
In addition, the KT7 offers great stability. As shown with my Duron 700 running stable at 1055mhz and with a 111mhz FSB. The memory tweaks available in the SoftBIOS are also of great importance, setting them as high as my memory would allow garnered another 10FPS in Quake 3. Pretty good for free tweaking. It also come with two extra USB ports on an extra connector which fits into the back, for a total of 4 USB ports. I think this is a very nice touch, I don't have that many USB devices, but it's nice to know I can. :)
Finally, I would recommend the Abit KT7 motherboard for the techies out there looking to maximize the performance of a Duron or Thunderbird processor. And if you are new to building your own computer but want to learn, the KT7 is optimal as it has SoftBIOS which is much easier to configure than competing tweaking options. The manual also covers the entire BIOS to help the newbies learn what everything does.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
merc13
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Member: Seth Moyers
Location: Staunton, VA
Reviews written: 13
Trusted by: 4 members
About Me:
Geeky student who plays with far too many nerdy toys.
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