Written By:
Date Posted: November 13, 2001
Introduced over a year ago, the AMD 760 chipset was the first to offer full DDR support for the AMD Athlon. It wasn't intended to be around for the long haul, but with other third party chipsets fumbling the ball, AMD has chosen to continue supplying it's robust Athlon Socket-A chipset to manufacturers. Abit was a little late adopting an Athlon DDR solution, but despite that, it's one of the more viable solutions on the market.
"DDR done right!", was Abit's claim for the KG7 series of Athlon DDR motherboards. Unlike most of the popular motherboards at the time, the KG7 didn't employ the troublesome KT266 chipset, but rather the AMD760 chipset. The setup is actually comprised of two parts, the AMD761 Northbridge, and the VIA 686B Southbridge. In most benchmarks, the AMD760 outpaced offerings from VIA, ALi, and SiS. Be aware that the VIA 686B Southbridge is still here though, and it drags along it's reported Sound Blaster Live! problems. I didn't have any problems myself, but I'm using the HighPoint RAID controller for my hard drive duties.
Like the KT7A-RAID before it, the KG7-RAID is an AMD Socket A motherboard. There are actually three flavours of the KG7 series. The "Lite", which has no RAID and two DIMM slots, the vanilla KG7, which has four DIMM slots, and of course the "RAID", which adds the HighPoint RAID controller. Like the KT133A, the KG7-RAID officially supports the 133FSB for the CPU and ram. The difference is, the KG7 supports DDR. The other usual suspects are supported as well, such as ATA100 support, AGP 4x, USB, and as the name suggests, RAID. Abit was a little late to the party, but seeing how the market for DDR wasn't so hot at the time, there was no rush. Now, we're seeing a flood of DDR motherboards, and the question is, does the KG7 still keep up?
Specifications
CPU
Support AMD Athlon/Duron 700MHz ~ 1.33GHz or future Socket A Processors based on 200/266 MHz(100MHz/133MHz Double Data Rate)
Chipset
AMD761/VIA 686B
Memory
Four 184-pin DIMM sockets support up to 4 GB PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM module
BIOS
SoftMenu"III Technology to set CPU parameters
Functions
Four channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to 8 Ultra DMA 33/66/100( RAID 0 /1/0+1).
Miscellaneous
1 AGP slot, 6 PCI slots.
Ultra DMA 100/RAID
High Point HTP370 IDE Controller
Abit didn't do as good a job with the motherboard layout as they have in the past. The PCB is cleanly laid out here, but the placement of some items are odd. One issue I had was with the DIMM slots. If I plug in a video card into the AGP slot, removing or inserting DIMMs in the fourth slot (#1 being furthest away from the CPU) may be difficult. Then again, that may be a moot point since many have reported issues when using more than 3 unbuffered DIMMs. I'll get into more of that later on, but let's just say if you got buffered ram lying around, you'll want to install that before the video card. Anyhow, in the event you have one or two unbuffered DIMMs, you will need to fill slot #1, then #2. This was new to me, since I normally install ram to the slots nearest to the CPU, but maybe this is Abit's solution to the DIMM/AGP fitting issue. Don't worry if you forget though, you'll get a big warning screen the first time you boot up, telling you to fix it.
Thankfully, Abit does not include any onboard sound, since it sucks usually, which cuts down a bit on the total cost. Being a consumer board, there isn't any AMR slots either. You do get plenty of PCI slots, and since an extra RAID controller is built in, the 6 PCI slots should be more than enough.
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