A Great Socket A Mainboard.
Written: Jan 21 '01 (Updated Jan 21 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Socket A, upgradabilitly of 1.25GHz, PC133 RAM, AGP-4x.
Cons: No onboard sound (could be an advatage)
The Bottom Line: An excellent all-rounder, with multiple possibilities in upgrading and performance.
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| MichaelHatton's Full Review: Abit KT7 Motherboard |
The KT7 follows the long ABIT tradition and comes with all kinds of gimmicks for overclocking. The so-called Soft Menu III combines all necessary functions like settings for FSB clock, multiplier (up to x12.5) and voltage supply. [TIP:For successful overclocking all L1 bridges on the processor must be closed]. One simple but effective tool is a graphite pin because the material is a good electric conductor.
This board is also available with UltraATA/100 RAID controller. ABIT uses the controller chip HPT370 from Highpoint. This type of board is called KT7 RAID and costs a little bit more.
Processor power.
The mainboard can take either of AMD's two best processors, the Duron: the bargain processor, and the Athlon: the power CPU. Either of these two processors can handle top-notch games and the toughest of graphics and high calculations. In most operating systems if they ever crashed it would be a surprise. The Duron starts at 600Mhz at £70 and goes right up to 800Mhz at £90, not much of a price difference with the speed. So you've already reached the peak at 800 though, that's when the Athlon comes into play. The Athlon has been around slightly longer than the Duron; it uses higher spec materials, such as aluminium instead of copper, so it is a little expensive: starting at 700Mhz and going to a non stopping number, I think its at 1.2 Ghz now (Dec-2000).
Slots
There's plenty of upgrade power on this motherboard, with a graphics card sound card and modem attached you'll still have 4 PCI slots and a ISA slot available. With the three PC133 RAM slots you have enough memory upgrades. I have three PC133 128Mb on it now and it runs almost the same as a single 128Mb card on, so there isn't much difference. I'd think the only difference would be in high quality games and graphics images, like photos.
Layout
There is not much to criticize about the layout, just that the DIMM clips obstructed by a long graphics card. [Therefore the clips must be closed before installing a graphics card]. Quite unusual is the fan on the Northbridge chip that is supposed to keep the temperature of the chipset component in a safe range even during overclocking. Also well placed is the power connecter, where it should be, right at the top and the IDE and floppy connecters are well placed, right at the side of the board. Some may criticize that the cpu is too close to the power supply, and could be tricky to replace the processor, it is a little hard to replace a fan, but the cpu can be placed easily.
Features
The board has no onboard sound, which can be better than thought; it means easy replacement for better sound cards, and easier to install. As I have had problem installing the drivers for the sound card and you have to enable it in the BIOS.
As I already stated the motherboard has SoftMenu in the Bios and this is in replacement of a jumper, which set the multiplier and clock speeds for the processor. Which means you can overclock the cpu without opening up the PC. So there is a total of 1 jumper on the motherboard [for CMOS reset only], which is good for beginners.
The KT7 is also available as a RAID setup, which gives you two extra IDE channels, which are controlled by another chip, offering a larger number of hard disks. It is slightly expensive, but offers higher possibilities, for addition drives, most, and myself are happy without the RAID ship.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 156
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MichaelHatton
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Location: Darlington, England
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