Abit has been a major player in the motherboard industry for quite some time. While they are not usually the first company to put out a motherboard on a given chipset, the products that they do put out are of extremely high quality. Abit is widely know in the overclocker community for putting out stable yet high performance hardware. I have been a user of the Abit KT7A-RAID since it has been introduced and have been extremely pleased with it despite the well-known bugs when combining it with SoundBlaster Live audio cards. I eagerly anticipated this new motherboard as it brings performance to the next level with the introduction of DDR memory as well as the now famous HighPoint ATA100/RAID controller. Would the KG7-RAID disappoint me? How stable is it? How does it perform? After all is said and done is it worth the price tag? These are the questions I had in mind while writing this review and giving the KG7-RAID a run.
The great folks at Azzo Computers provided me with this motherboard as well as the RAM I used. Azzo is a familiar name when it comes to high quality RAM. You will see in a later article why that still holds true. You can currently get this board from Azzo for $185.
Specs
You can find info on this motherboard on the Abit site here.
(This is a spec list that you can also find in the KG7 FAQ over at ViaHardware.com
. If you own a KT7 or KG7 this FAQ holds an invaluable amount of information
and you really should give it a look.)
CPU
Support AMD Athlon 700MHz ~ 1.4GHz or future Socket A Processors based on 200/266 MHz (100MHz/133MHz Double Data Rate)
Support AMD Duron 600MHz ~ 900MHz or future Socket A Processors based on 200 MHz (100MHz Double Data Rate)
Chipset
AMD761 north bridge, VIA VT82C686B southbridge
Supports Ultra DMA 33/66/100 IDE protocol
Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)
Accelerated Graphics Port connector supports AGP 2X(3.3V)and 4X(1.5V)mode (Sideband) device
Supports 200/266 MHz (100MHz/133MHz Double Data Rate) Memory Bus Settings
Ultra DMA 100/ RAID
High Point HPT370 IDE Controller
Ultra DMA 100MB/sec data transfer rate
Concurrent PIO and bus master access (ATA port accessible during DMA transfer)
Two independent ATA channels
256 byte FIFO per ATA channel
Plug & Play compliant
RAID 0 (striping mode for boosting performance)
RAID 1 (mirroring mode for data security)
RAID 0 + 1(striping and mirroring)
Supported by all Microsoft Windows versions, DOS 5.X and above and ABIT Gentus 3.0a or later (Linux)
Automatically fine-tunes each IDE device to the best performance
Supports Ultra 5/4/3/2/1/0, PIO 4/3/2/1/0 and DMA 2/1/0 drive modes
Recognizes drives up to 128GB
Memory
Four 184-pin DIMM sockets support PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM module
Supports up to 4 GB MAX. (64, 128, 256, 512,1024 MB DDR SDRAM)
Note: the motherboard accepts either up to 2 DIMMs of unbuffered DDR SDRAM (2GB max) or up to 4 DIMMs of registered DDR SDRAM (4GB max). You cannot mix unbuffered and registered SDRAM, nor can you have more than two sticks of unbuffered SDRAM.
System BIOS
SoftMenuTM III Technology to set CPU parameters
Supports Plug-and-Play (PNP)
Supports Advanced Configuration Power Interface (ACPI)
Supports Desktop Management Interface (DMI)
Write-Protect Anti-Virus function by AWARD BIOS
Multi I/O Functions
Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB
Two Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to four Ultra DMA 33/66/100 devices
Two Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to four Ultra DMA 33/66/100 (RAID 0/1/10)
Built-in Standard /EPP/ECP parallel port connector
Two built-in 16530 fast UART compatible serial port connectors
Built-in PS/2 Keyboard and PS/2 mouse port connectors
On board USB header for four extra USB channels
Miscellaneous
ATX form factor
1 AGP slot, 6 PCI slots
Hardware monitoring - Including Fan speed, Voltages, System environment temperature
Built-in Wake on LAN header (but ATX power supply must supply 720mA on 5V line in standby mode)
Check it out here. 