Introduction
Ever since my first foray into the world of Socket A back in December 2000 with an ABIT KT7, I've been a big ABIT fan. Every board I've had from them has performed very well indeed and been rock solidly reliable - capable of delivering great stability as well as good performance. I've had the KT7, KT7A and KR7A-RAID, and each board has improved upon the previous.
When the time came to upgrade my CPU to an AthlonXP 2400+, I found my ABIT KR7A-RAID would not support any CPU higher than the XP2100+ without modification to the board or the CPU - slightly annoying given other manufacturers, (including the considerably cheaper ECS) KT266A boards worked with it fine.
So, it was time to choose a new motherboard to serve me for the next year, and house my AthlonXP 2400+. A quick bit of research showed I had several choices as far as VIA chip-setted boards were concerned - the AT7-MAX, AT7-MAX2, KX7-333 and KD7. Given that I still required use of my legacy ports, the ABIT MAX boards were out of the equation. With Nforce2 still not upon us at the time of purchase, this left two choices – the KX7-333 and the KD7. I decided to try both, and retain the board which most took my fancy.
The boards are slightly different - full specifications can be found further on, but basically the ABIT KX7-333 has a VIA KT333 chipset, and the KD7 has the VIA KT400, as well as both onboard sound and onboard LAN. The KT333 supports PC2100 and PC2700 - the KT400 supports both of these as well as adding unofficial support for PC3200 DDR.
