Technical Specification
Specs
The main advantage of this board is the VIA chipset which even though it has relativly poor memory bandwidth it has a cool feature your can run your memory at Host (FSB 100mhz) Speed or, Host + PCI Clock (133mhz), or Host-PCI Clock (66mhz). This means with this board you can run with any type of memory The general layout of this board is very good with the ATX power supply positioned between the cpu interface (SlotA) and the memory slots (Dimms) and unlike the biostar it doesnt obscure the space in between. There is something which we havent seen on athlon boards before and this is that the Athlon mainboard has four DIMM slots, each which can take up to 512 megabytes of memory.
The 686A Southbridge provides support for UltraATA/66 if the correct 80-line cable is used with an UltraATA/66 drive. Abit has laid out the pins for the ATA connectors and the ATA/100 chip on the board, they just haven't placed these items there yet. We can assume that's what these connectors are for. So we wouldn't be surprised if we see these connectors in place on a future "KA7 MK2" board.
Abit like Highpoint controllers, and were the first manufacturer to use ATA/66 on BX mainboards. There are plans for a UDMA 100 controller on here, and there are rumours about RAID included as well, if these are true then this board will rock! plain and simple!
The board has a standard Award bios but there are many features, which will be discussed later. The KX133 will officially support ram up to 133Mhz, although the BIOS implementation allows the direct selection of speeds up to 155Mhz, with an option to increase this still further will an additional setting. Both VCore and VIO voltage settings are also included, to allow over-volting both the CPU and the chipset.
There are 4 fan headers on this motherboard which are very useful for us the end user. We had a few problems on the Biostar with it failing on both headers on the motherboard, but on this one we run both fans off one! There is also a CPU probe included the same as was on the BE6 which means you can check temps on all parts of the motherboard. (gfx card, hdd etc..)
With Abit's past reputation for producing some of the best overclocking boards in the world, the choice of components proved to be a difficult decision. To do the board justice we decided to go for the fastest system we could build.
