Ok today were going jump rite in the SocketA arena and see what Abit has brought to the table. We've been Abit fans around here for a while, but we have never been too impressed with VIA chipsets to date, but all that is changing for the better. Seeing how this is Abit's first venture into the Socket A AMD market, we decided to wipe the slate clean and look at this with an open mind.
Ok today were going jump rite in the SocketA arena and see what Abit has brought to the table. We've been Abit fans around here for a while, but we have never been too impressed with VIA chipsets to date, but all that is changing for the better. Seeing how this is Abit's first venture into the Socket A AMD market, we decided to wipe the slate clean and look at this with an open mind.
We'll jump right into this and see what we got for our $142 from MicroBarn.com . As soon as you open up the box you greeted with a very sweet looking board. The Active cooler and fan on the chipset stands out the most. With 1 AGP, 6 PCI's and only one aging ISA slot on this board, even you peeps with every add on card known to man will have room for your toyz on this board.
In the box you get a very well laid out manual which covers the KT7Raid and the plain jane KT7 flava of the board that we're looking at today. Also included is a PCI adapter with 2 more USB ports on it, giving you a grand total of 4 USB's available to you with this board. This is most impressive seeing how a lot of things are heading in the USB direction, what is sad is I don't even own ANY USB equipment!
The next thing that stands out to me in a big way is the fact that the ATX power connector is located at the top of the board. I've always wondered why a company who is making a board for the overclocking community that is very concerned with airflow, would make us route that big tangle of wires halfway down the side of the board. This to me is a major adjustment from my previous BE6 where the ATX connector was located between the CPU and the USB and serial connectors. Kudos to ABIT on that one as well. Notice the location in the picture below.
Another thing that appears to be tailor made for the overclocker, is the four three pin RPM monitoring fan headers on this board. Now I certainly wouldn't recommend running a couple of 120mm monsters off of these things, but to run your chipset coolers and CPU cooler, these come in VERY handy.
As we mentioned above, the thing that REALLY separates this board from the competition is the active cooling that Abit included on the KT 133 chipset. Now whether this is necessary or not is debatable, but the one thing that is NOT debatable is the fact that it damn sure looks cool as hell!! The only thing we didn't like about this is the same thing that bothers us about just about any retail heat sink, the way its attached to the chip. I swear, I think they just throw a glob of good 'ol Elmers in there and call it a day. We of course had to reattach it with some real thermal paste.
Alright, now that we've seen the basics of this board, lets get down to the nitty gritty...... Let's look at installation of this thing. Installation on this board was as simple as any out there. Now this board is a little bigger than the BE6 I replaced with this, but it should still fit into just about any mid tower case without a hitch. We used a large full tower with removable mobo tray so this was no problem for me to pop out my aging BE6 and install the KT7. Once all the screws were tight and the cables connected, it was time for some 300w Power Supply Luv'n!!!! WooooHaaaaaa......
Uhoh, UHOH!!!! WTF??? Nothing! Not a flicker, not a beep, not so much as a puff of smoke. The results we got from turning on the switch were the exact same that we were seeing with the damn thing off, absolutely NOT A DAMN THING!! We went thru all the basic checks, power supply plugged in, IDE's plugged in correctly, cards seated, CPU in, nothing loose, STILL nothing! After reaching the point of defeat and finishing off the 12 pack we purchased for just this reason, we decided it was time to get in touch with who we bought this VERY expensive paper weight from.
We called Chris at Microbarn and explained our situation. Chris wasted no time personally bench testing a new board and getting it out to us overnight mail. To this day we don't know exactly what was wrong with our first KT7, other than the fact it was deader than a a theif hiding under the bed of two fat people bumping uglies. We send big props out to the folks at MicroBarn for reacting so quickly and rectifying the situation. Whether it was dead from the factory or from UPS playing field hockey with it we'll never know.
Once we got our second board installed and connected, it was time to try the power switch again, and low and behold, this time it fired up without a hitch.
One thing I would like to point out is that there are resisters mounted directly below the AGP slot. With three different GeForce cards it was a non issue, but when we put out Voodoo 3 3000 in the heat sink rested on top of the resisters. While this may not be a huge issue, if you are into strapping big 'ol heat sinks on the graphics chip (like we are!) this may be an issue.
After the initial boot up this is what you will be greeted with upon entering the BIOS setup. Now lets take a brief look into what makes Abit a great choice for OCer's. and that's SoftMenuIII, Abit's ultra configurable bios.
We're not going to go too in depth here for two reasons. A. Chances are good you are already familiar with the Soft Menu, and B. If we were to touch on ALL the features of the softmenu we would be on page 15 and still not done!! If curiosity is getting the best of you and life simply cannot go on without further explanation, check out Abit's KT7 Specs page and download the users manual.
One area of the bios we WILL go into a bit of detail about is the memory settings. If you buy this board and don't go into the bios and tweak these settings, your performance WILL suck! With the VIA chipsets, even with the more recent bios's, they NEED to be tweaked to realize the true potential of them, and the KT7 is no different.
Below are some screen shots of the memory settings in the bios you will need to change:
.
Seems like such a simple screen doesn't it? Well it's where your bread and butter are at in this board. Now obviously memory varies greatly, so to each is own, but I recommend setting your timing to turbo and setting your DRAM bank interleave to "4-way". I am about to show you the gains we achieved by making these changes. Bear in mind we did these benches using a generic 128mb stick of PC100 ram, imagine what we may have accomplished had we had some good stuff!
BEFORE AFTER
Now obviously you can see that there is a huge difference, and like I said, this is memory that is NOT running at 33mhx faster than the FSB, which is also an option on this board.
Wow, where were we? Oh, that's right, we were about to get into overclocking with this board. The KT7 has the SoftMenuIII as we mentioned before, so the options are limitless within reason. The Thunderbird 700 that we got in with this board was no multiplier locked ( as the new ones now are) so we had free reign to push this thing to the limit.
We took our time and tried just about every FSB/Multiplier combination imaginable. We the highest we were able to get this thing to run was 1050mhz, which is NOT too shabby at all. Unfortunately it was about as stable as a Cyrix without a heat sink! We WERE able to find this chips sweet spot, and it was 100 x 9.5 for a very respectable 950mhz.
I would have to say that while we are VERY happy with these results, we would have liked to give this a shot before the review with some good memory.
The funnest thing about OCing this board is that for the first time since I had my celeron 366, the motherboard is not what is holding me back. This board is about as versatile as it gets when it comes to overclocking options.
Wow, all that and I think we're pretty much thru here. Hopefully you read everything to this point and didn't just skip to the end. If you read the whole thing your probably not going to be surprise at what I'm gonna say here to sum up this article. This board is arguably the best Socket A board if not the best all round board that Abit has produced. So I will give much props to Abit for hitting a home run with this one. I Bustercaps, being of no mind and body-by-Killians, and the only one here at OCA secret labs that is running AMD... will have to give the KT7 a big thumbs up..
The KT7's is full of excellent features that are geared solely towards usoverclockers. Overclockers need to be able to do what we do best ... and that is to get all we can out of our equipment for the smallest amount of jack possible . So to end it...I would have to say ABIT will rule the SocketA market till someone else out there decides to jump on the bandwagon and start designing there boards with us Ocer's in mind. We here at OCA don't put a number value to our review of equipment ...like we stated before what is our opinion is not necessarily your opinion.
PRO's:
Great Stability
The SoftMenuIII kicks ass
Price ($142)
Well Documented Manual
Features
CONS:
One ISA (too much or too little depending on the user.)
First one was dead
Resistors too close to the AGP Slot
Bad job of attaching the heat sink to the chipset.
There ya have it folks. There's no way we could have given ya all the info about this board, but if there's more ya wanna know or have a question, drop me a line HERE.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
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