Written By:
Date Posted: August 6, 2001

Most of you are probably familiar with , but for those of you that are not, Abit has been around for a long time, making some of the most popular retail motherboards. Their claim to fame is their tweakability, solid design, and adding some advanced features to their motherboards such as RAID support and their Soft Menu BIOS. Abit has always been near or at the top of performance and stability. The KT7A-RAID is no exception.

The KT7A-RAID is an AMD Socket A motherboard. It's licensed the Northbridge chipset to power this board. Basically, in a nutshell, the officially supports the 133FSB for the CPU and ram. This is good for a few reasons. People can now use the newer AMD Athlons with the 266Mhz bus at it's full potential, and they can possibly overclock the older 200Mhz bus Athlons to higher, more stable speeds. The previous KT133 chipset was unable to go faster than 115, on average, so the KT133A certainly opens the door. As you will see later on, the small jump from 100FSB (older Athlons and the original KT133) to 133FSB yields impressive performance gains in most applications. The other usual suspects are supported as well, such as ATA100 support, AGP 4x, ACPI and USB.

Specifications

CPU: Supports AMD Athlon/Duron 600MHz-1.2GHz 200/266MHz FSB Socket A Processors
Chipset: VIA KT133A /VIA 686B
Ultra RAID DMA 100, RAID 0/1/0+1Technology
High Point HTP370 IDE Controller
Memory: Three 168-pin DIMM sockets support up to 1.5 GB PC100/PC133 SDRAM module
Multi I/O: Four channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to 8 Ultra DMA 33/66/100 devices
Miscellaneous: 1 AGP slot, 6 PCI slots and 1 ISA slots
BIOS: SoftMenu"III Technology to set CPU parameters

Abit did a good job with the motherbooard design. The last motherboard I had made almost no sense with it's layout. The PCB is very clean here, and the board should have no problems fitting in the majority of ATX cases. The only major issue I had was with the DIMM slots. If I plug in a video card into the AGP slot (which you need to do eventually), removing or inserting DIMMs in the first slot may be difficult. Oh yes, I mention DIMMs. This is a SDRAM only board. It's fully compatible with PC100/133 ram, so anyone who bought a few truckloads will be happy here. Thankfully, Abit does not include any onboard sound, since it sucks usually, which cuts down a bit on the total cost.

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