Not So Great Anymore
Written: Apr 08 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: On-board RAID, 6 PCI, VC-SDRAM support, SoftMenu III
Cons: Not very overclockable, outdated, expensive
The Bottom Line: Good KT133 board with RAID, but there are better alternatives out now.
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| graffixboy's Full Review: Abit KT7-RAID Motherboard |
For the longest time, the KT7-RAID was the flagship motherboard for the Athlon. Boasting on-board RAID and stepless frequency adjustments, it was the dream of overclockers everywhere come true. Unfortunately, a year has passed since its introduction and there dozens of newer boards out there that surpass this one in features and performance. But if you absolutely must buy a KT133 motherboard to support your older socket-a Athlon, this is a very good board.
Features
The board can support Athlons starting at 500 Mhz since 5x is the lowest (and default) CPU multiplier. With SoftMenu III, you can go from 100 Mhz all the way up. Most of the high bus settings are impossible though because of the limitations of the chipset.
It also has 3 DIMM slots which can support 168-pin SDRAM and VC-SDRAM with the option of 2 or 4-way memory interleaving (this is a similar function to RAID for main memory). The addition of VC-SDRAM is very nice, since VC-SDRAM will give about 5-10% increase in performance across the board.
There is a standard set of integrated peripherals. 2 UDMA 33 IDE controllers, 2 USB, 2 PS/2, 2 Serial, 1 Parallel, 1 Floppy, and 2 ports for an ATA100 RAID controller. Both storage controllers support up to 4 devices each, giving a total of up to 8 hard disks that your motherboard could have!
What I Like About It
The board was absolutely stable without overclocking it. I've ran anything and everything on my machine, and never have I got a crash that wasn't the fault of Windows. Days of Counter-Strike, UD Cancer crunching, DivX encoding and rasterizing doesn't phase the board. It is typical quality Abit.
The RAID controller was very easy to set up...as long as all your hard disks are designed for it. It gives you what the controller recognizes, then you pick the disks and what kind of RAID setup you would like to have. Very intuitive. You can do RAID 0, 1, 0+1, sorry no RAID 5.
SoftMenu III is also very nice. I like the BIOSes Abit puts on their motherboards. There are a lot of features that one could play around with. It is very well organized compared to the AMI BIOS Asus puts in their motherboards. The only gripe I have with the KT7-RAID Bios is with memory settings. Medium, Fast, Turbo are pretty vague for memory timings, but they do give you the feature of manually setting your CAS latency (although I would like to set the RAS and RAs to CAS delay). To change the bus settings, just pick one from the list, save, and restart. Very easy. If your computer doesn't POST because you overclocked it too high, just take out the CMOS batter for a bit and put it back in. This will clear the CMOS, if you don't want to do it properly and look for the jumper that clears it.
What I Didn't Like
The first complaint I have with this board its lack of a fourth DIMM slot. 3 is fine for most users, but if you're buying this board, it's most likely going to be used as a high-end single processor PC. I would like to be able to do true 4-way interleaving for if and when I run any kind of game server, or need to do some serious graphical work.
The on-board USB ports do not supply enough power/bandwidth for my Logitech Optical and my ATI TV Wonder card. The system would have a system hang for about a second every few minutes. Very annoying. I am going to install the USB header that came with the board to hopefully solve the problem.
I don't (anymore) like the KT133 chipset, and it's the biggest beef I have with this board. It is old and outdated. There are better chipsets out now that not only support 133 Mhz FSB, but also DDR-SDRAM.
It is also NOT very overclockable. I could not even POST at 133 Mhz even with my nice new Mushkin Rev. 3 memory. I don't know how everyone is overclocking this thing so high. I got Windows to boot at 124 Mhz, but ran really unstable. It crashed after I tried to load Counter-Strike and run a memory benchmark in Sandra 2001. I believe that overclocking this board is useless anyway. I barely got any improvement in performance. Besides, taking this board anything but 100 Mhz FSB will throw the CPU into asynchronous operation which will really kill your scores despite having the higher frequency. The extra line noise and overclocking of the PCI will just lead to more instability. (The PCI frequency settings increases by 1 Mhz (up to 41 Mhz) until you hit 134 Mhz FSB, which is then drops back down to 34 Mhz...yuck). Overclocking the PCI bus is not good. It could potentially damage any and all of your cards.
Conclusion
This is a good board if you have to buy a KT133 board with RAID. If you just want a KT133 board without the RAID, also look at the A7V from Asus and the K7T Pro 2 from MSI. They are 2 other great boards that deserves a look also. The inherent limitations of the KT133 chipset and the cost will keep me from recommending this board to anyone else. There are just better things out there now.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 160
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Epinions.com ID:
graffixboy
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Member: some guy
Location: Long Island, NY
Reviews written: 42
Trusted by: 4 members
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