Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. February 1, 2001-Editor's Choice. This is an award not given out often, and then only after careful consideration. Firing Squad presents the new KT7A-RAID with the Editor's Choice Award. On the KT7A-RAID, Firing Squad declare, "It looks like we've found our reference KT133A platform. "Optimizing Performance is what it is all about and KT7A-RAID gives you that. "We were able to squeeze the KT7A system past AMD's 760 chipset in performance, using inexpensive (and widely available) PC100/PC133 SDRAM."
As far as layout is concerned, "ABIT uses active cooling on the North Bridge of the KT133A chipset and ABIT still boasts its 3-phase power solution for the KT7A. To minimize the trace distances between the 8363A North Bridge and the CPU socket/AGP slot, ABIT tilts the chip 45 degrees. This should result in cleaner signals between these components."
As Firing Squad note, "Glancing over the board it's very apparent that it was designed for hardcore hardware enthusiasts: six PCI slots with one ISA slot for legacy devices are available, four IDE connectors for up to eight devices total are present, four fan headers for powering cooling devices, and the HighPoint HPT370 IDE controller is used for ATA/100 RAID support."
"ABIT's SoftMenu III implementation on the KT7 series of motherboards is the most powerful BIOS interface we've ever seen." Infact, Firing Squad go so far as to say, "SoftMenu III is nirvana." So what does Nirvana bring these days? "The KT7A-RAID ran stable at bus speeds up to 145MHz. However, results can vary from board to board. ABIT engineers have overclocked retail boards up to 150MHz. That effectively equates to 300MHz, just 100MHz shy of the 400MHz Pentium 4 front side bus. That's pretty impressive performance in our book."
To bring the review to a conclusion, Firing Squad confirm, "The KT7A offers all the same features we loved the original KT7 for: best-in-class performance, g |
