Abit makes the coolest boards
Written: Nov 29 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent features and performance
Cons: Somewhat pricey
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| Granto's Full Review: Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard |
The first Abit motherboard I used was the PR-5, which was a pentium motherboard, and had jumpers you had to set. Since then, I've used several models, and been entirely satisfied with all of them.
Abit's softmenu is one of the greatest inventions for overclockers and system builders. Being able to plug a new CPU into a board without having to preconfigure it saves a lot of time. Being able to change bus speeds and voltages without opening the case is a real advantage for overclockers.
I haven't had time to experiment with this one much yet, but I put my Duron 600 in it last week, and it's been running at 850 MHz since then, without a crash. It did crash once at 900 MHz, but what do you expect from a $50 CPU?
I was able to install windows2000 in less than 30 minutes. Although I have two 7200 rpm, 30 GB Maxtor Hard drives, I had critical data on one already, so I was not able to make a striped RAID array yet. I do get 30 MB/s from each of the drives, though. I don't expect it to outperform a SCSI RAID Array, but it's close enough, at a fraction of the price.
It is currently being used as a gaming/Video editing sytem, and works flawlessly.
The non-RAID version (KT7) would suit most people's needs, and is a bit cheaper ($30 or so). But it costs more than that to add the cheapest IDE RAID controller, so if you think you might want to play with it, or want to use 8 IDE drives, go for it.
1 AGP,6 PCI, and 1 ISA slot are nothing to sneeze at, either. Lots of other boards include crummy onboard sound, or useless AMR/CNR slots. Since Abit caters more to the hobbyist crowd, they knew to leave that off.
The only reason I would buy a different motherboard right now was if Abit released a Dual-Athlon motherboard, and even then, I would wait a while for the price to come down.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Granto
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Location: Bellingham, WA
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
I don't write as many epinions as I used to, because they pay less now.
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