Installation
After we reviewed the ABIT KA7 Slot A Athlon Motherboard, we were very happy for once that a VIA chipset based motherboard wasn’t letting people down. ABIT had yet again managed to sort out the Overclockers with something they could tweak and push to the max. People knew that this mobo would simply rock from the first time they heard about it! When AMD launched their Socket A CPU's (the Thunderbird and the Duron) I was worried that because ABIT had just finished the KA7-100 (the KA7 with full RAID support), it might be a while until they manufactured a Socket A version. But, I was wrong to worry! They managed to sort out, yet again, another god like motherboard. Asus and many other companies have released their Socket A Boards and now ABIT have, so is ABIT's KT7-RAID offering good enough to beat the rest? Well read on...The general layout of the board is very neat with many nice features which we all like to see. They have included 6 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot (for people with old soundcards, modems, SCSI cards etc.) but no AMR port, which is a good point in my opinion. AMR peripherals slow down your PC as AMR is purely software controlled - therefore, lots of CPU power is needed for anything using such a port to execute any of it's commands (example - Modems: an ISA hardware modem would have better performance than a software modem running on an AMR port and also less CPU usage is achieved with a hardware modem simply because it is not software accelerated). ABIT have also included RAID on this board coming in the form of an ATA100/RAID Highpoint HPT370 controller chipset, which is a very neat idea, but we are not going to touch RAID in detail in this review as we are doing a RAID summary soon and this feature will be incorporated into this upcoming article! Another feature which in a way helps and in another way is slightly annoying is the fact that ABIT have dropped down to 3 DIMM slots on this motherboard. I would have preferred to have seen 4 but apparently there is an increase in performance by only using 3. The best feature on this board and a feature which Hexus ourselves have been recommending for manufacturers to add for a while is a cooler on the KT133 Chipset. ABIT have put a small active cooler on the Northbridge (KT133) chipset which intends to help stability of the motherboard and also allow it to reach higher FSB's at a more stable rate.
One thing with the onboard RAID is the fact that it isn’t true hardware RAID as you can actually execute software RAID under the Microsoft Windows 2000 O.S. (if you have 2 hard drives) and this is all that ABIT have done in this implementation. They have moved this feature into the bios on the mainboard to make it a lot easier to configure and control. Our KA7 didn’t have RAID support as it was an early review board, but I've heard that it wasn’t the easiest RAID implementaion to configure and run in a system, so ABIT this time have opted for a Highpoint controller integrated into their system. But, the RAID/ATA100 Chipset uses an IRQ itself meaning less are free for other devices, which is bad if you have quite a heavily packed system. As the KT7 has the extra IDE controller from the HPT370 chipset, ABIT have added in more IDE connectors and these are aqua-green in colour and you can use all of the IDE controllers (standard ones implemented into the KT133 chipset as well as those from the HPT370 chipset) at the same time allowing for quite a lot of IDE devices!
As usual with most recent ABIT motherboards, the ATX PSU connector is on the edge of the board right at the top so you don’t have lots of large cables going across the CPU area of the mainboard causing havoc and looking messy. The exact location is in the clear space between the Socket A itself and the 3 DIMM slots - this means that it won't hinder the use and airflow of larger CPU coolers.
On this mainboard, as I have already said, there are 6 PCI slots which is excellent. But, you need to be careful where you specifically put your cards in these slots as they can cause a massive problem with IRQ's as several of the slots use a shared IRQ.
