Abit kt7a: ABIT KT7A-RAID Socket-A KT133A ATX

Memory

1. Three 168-pin DIMM sockets support PC100/PC133 SDRAM module

2. Supports up to 1.5 GB MAX. (8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512MB SDRAM)


System BIOS

1. SOFTMENU III Technology to set CPU parameters

2. Award Plug and Play BIOS

<sub>3. Write-Protect Anti-Virus function by AWARD BIOS

4. Year 2000 Compliant</sub>

Multi I/O Functions

1. Two Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to four<sub>Ultra
DMA 33/66/100 (up to 4HDD device) 2. Two Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to
four Ultra DMA 33/66/100

3. PS/2 Keyboard and PS/2 Mouse Connectors

4. 1x Floppy Port (up to 2.88MB)

5. 1x Parallel Port (EPP/ECP)

6. 2x Serial Ports

7. 2x USB Connectors

8. On board USB header for Two extra USB channels</sub>

<sub>Miscellaneous

1. ATX form factor

2. 1 AGP slot, 6 PCI slots and 1 ISA slots</sub>

<sup>3. Hardware monitoring — Including Fan speed, Voltages, System environment
temperature

4. Built-in Wake on LAN/Wake on Modem

5. Built-in IrDA TX/RX header</sup>

Some pictures of the board

Some Background on the board

Abit where among the first to fit a Fan on the Northbridge
chipset, they set the trend, now heatsink and fans are common on nearly every
recent motherboard Northbridge controller. The fan keeps the Northbridge cooler
and adds stability at the higher
bus speeds offered on the newer boards. In another trend setting move Abit
where among the first to include Jumperless setup, all the functions of the
motherboard are available within the SoftMenu in the BIOS, this makes setting up the Abit
motherboards as painless and easy as possible, fumbling about for tiny jumpers
and poring over board diagram layouts trying to find hidden jumper JP23 has
become a thing of the past.

Here are a few shots of the Abit Softmenu 3
BIOS, and the important bits where you adjust the CPU multiplier and memory
speeds

So having seen the board, lets see what it can do.

I ran it with a 1200MHz Athlon Thunderbird CPU and it easily got the
Tbird up to 1400MHz, obviously this has a lot to do with the choice of CPU, but
the Abit board with all it’s tweaks offers the best possible chance of
overclocking the CPU and running it successfully, Abit have been loudly touting
the 3 phase power circuits built on the board whilst over manufacturers stick
with a 2 phase voltage circuit design, the 3 phase power design is supposed to
offer better
stability under the high current loads of the latest CPU’s and especially the
overclocked Tbird’s, and it also offers much better heat dissipation, throughout the boards
components. It also hopefully offers support for the next generation AMD CPU’s

Performance doesn’t vary especially much with the new KT133A boards, they all
essentially use the same components, the KT133A and the new VIA 686B Southbridge
which has native support for ATA 100 transfer rates, the Abit does however offer
lots of features to improve memory performance, these features aren’t
implemented on all KT133 boards, and yet again Abit leads the pack in this area,
the key area where Abit seem to lead is in the swift rectification of problems
with the boards, usually this is a new BIOS release which fixes and improves
speed and offers extra features.

There are a whole swathe of forums and newsgroups on the internet dedicated
to the Abit KT7 and KT7A series motherboards, these offer invaluable help with
any little niggling problems which might be affecting the motherboard, and the
software / games you use.

I must say I like Abit motherboards a lot, just about every motherboard I’ve
had in the past few years, has been an Abit, I’ve gone from the BH6 through to
the BE6 and now on with the KT7 series and they’ve all performed, and kept of
performing consistently over the years.

Another area where Abit lead is with the inclusion of the Highpoint RAID
controller, ever since the old Pentium II / III motherboard with the release of
the BE6 Abit have been including the Highpoint Controllers onboard, this at
first just allowed the inclusion of faster Hard Drive speeds, with UDMA 66
support. As time went by Highpoint released the 370 controller with
onboard RAID support, this was implemented first on the Abit KA7 100
motherboard, it included the Highpoint 370 controller, which had the option of
being a RAID controller, this was not a widely advertised feature at the time
back in early 2000, in fact it required a beta BIOS Flash to allow the
controller to work in RAID mode, once this was done though, the board had RAID
support, this allowed RAID 0 and 1, and 0 + 1

Click here for a slightly more thorough rundown on RAID

RAID has become very widely accepted in the computer/overclocking community over
the past 6 months or so, this I would have to say is due largely to Abit
including RAID support on a lots of it’s motherboards, other manufacturers
have taken a leaf out of Abit’s book and included RAID support as well. The
implementation with the Highpoint Controller is one of the First IDE RAID
controllers around, there have been others notably Promise, which also offer IDE
RAID, but the Highpoint is probably the most common at the moment.

Phew with that little bit about RAID over lets see what it means for your
computer and the all important Benchmarks. With one hard drive on the Abit KT7 A
RAID you can expect disc benchmarks of around 23,000 this is with the popular
IBM GXP 75 30Gb hard drive, with two of these Drives fitted you can expect disc
performance to nearly double lets see some benchmark pictures.

On the onboard VIA 686B ATA 100 Controller using a single IBM GXP75 30.7Gb
drive

With RAID enabled using the Highpoint Controller with two IBM GXP75 30.7GB
drives

The only bit where RAID doesn’t seem to increase the performance is in the
random read and write tests, though these results are certainly no lower than a
single drive, the buffered and sequential transfer rates are much higher
than with a single drive. Overall RAID 0 makes the computer feel quicker
and more responsive in loading applications and large games, the only downside
is the extra expense and the bit of extra time on Windows bootup as the RAID
array is initialized.

Well that’s the drive benchmarks covered in some detail now on with the other
bits, obviously there are a wide variety of different factors which influence
the overall speed of the motherboard, CPU choice for one, memory speed for
another and probably the most. important to lots of people out there the
graphics card.

As I said earlier I used a 1200MHz CPU with the motherboard, it was guaranteed
stable at 1400MHz by OcUK, OcUK only guarantee the CPU’s to work on the Abit
motherboards, this says a lot for Abit since they obviously have a lot of faith
in the product.

I could run a whole bunch of tests of the board, but since I just reviewed
the whole OcUK bundle last week, it seems somewhat pointless so I’ll just show you
the most popular Sandra benchmarks.

and finally the memory benchmarks

Memory Performance

This is one place where the Abit really shines
above other socket A boards on the market it offers lots of tweaking
possibilities. Memory performance and
bandwidth make quite a large difference to the whole computer’s performance and
benchmark results. To prove what a difference the BIOS settings make to memory
performance I set the bios to default settings ran the CPU at 100MHz FSB and the
results was well very low !, this is easily sorted out, read on to find out how
(O: .

If you wait for the picture above to load you
will see the memory benchmarks are taken at the various different settings and
finally with the FSB maxed out at 150MHZ with all the various options in the
Abit BIOS turned on for extra memory performance. Below is a shot of the
BIOS screen inside Advanced Chipset where all these memory settings are
adjusted.

In advanced Chipset
features, the memory timing was set to Turbo, Interleave was set to 4 way and
CAS latency set to 2, these are the main options for performance setting, they
only work with decent quality branded memory, such as Crucial or Mushkin, with
cheaper spec memory you may not be able to turn on all the performance settings
and still maintain stability.

Game Benchmarks

Just about everyone plays games so lets see how
the Abit copes with a few gaming benchmarks

First off with 3DMark 2000

Quake 3

Default	640*800	800*600	1024*768	1280*1024	1600*1200
fastest	169. 1	167.5	163.2	143.9	109.4
HQ	159.5	152.1	125.3	80.7	55.7
EHQ	155.2	146.9	116.7	74.4	51.6

The Abit board is a good gaming platform it
performed flawlessly with all the performance option enabled including 4*AGP and Fast Writes,
I had no problems with stability, with earlier versions of
the Athlon motherboard chipsets it was necessary to resort to 2*AGP with no Fast
Writes. Via have sussed this out an now the KT133A chipset is regarded as a high
performance motherboard chipset. I had gaming stability up to 143MHz FSB, above that and games crashed.
For a final gaming benchmark I tried out 3dmark 2000 and tried to get the
highest possible score. At the default 3DMark 2000 benchmark of 1024*768 * 16 bit I got
the score shown below.

Conclusion

The KT7A RAID motherboard has lots of potential, with the right choice of
system components it can be built into a very fast computer, I had the system
specced out with some of the best kit around at the moment, a 1200MHz CPU @
1400MHz, Crucial PC133 CAS 2 memory, and the Hercules Geforce 2 Ultra, this
along with the Pioneer DVD drive and SoundBlaster Live 1024, turned it into a
system capable of playing any game within the next year with ease. Also a
system with upgrade potential, the KT7A will take a faster CPU and the numerous
PCI expansion slots and memory expansion capability should see it lasting a good
while yet (O:. The only slight improvements Abit could make in my eyes would be
to offer a wider voltage adjustment within the BIOS maybe up to 1.95volts, this
would allow people to squeeze that last bit of performance out of their CPU’s,
Abit used to offer a wider voltage adjustment on the older KA7 series boards, so
there probably isn’t much stopping them from building this into the KT7 series,
this is my one small niggle with the board, there are ways around the voltage
issue but a simple option for 0.1volts extra in the BIOS would be good. I do
like this board a lot though, it offers overclockers all the facilities we need
to get the best out of the system, and you cant really expect much more from a
motherboard, this along with Abit’s experience in this market and there
continual bug fixing BIOS updates and web presence ensures that the Abit KT7
series motherboards are winners in my eyes. (O:

For a full rundown on a
complete KT7A with full benchmarks results read my system review here

a very small guru — Ferra.

ru

I don’t think Abit needs to be introduced to anyone. Her products, too. We, perhaps, will not talk about what motherboards and for whom this company makes — this is already known. Let’s talk in detail, but only about one product of this company — the AI7 motherboard with µGuru technology.

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AI7 is packaged in a dark box with the µGuru chip. What’s not in this box! By the way, why not? There is no second SATA cord, everything else is there: a bracket with two USB and one FireWire, a SATA cable and a power adapter, UATA and FDD cables, a rear panel plug, a CD and three instructions: Quick Installation Guide, Quick Guide and a full User’s Manual . The first one has a Russian section, the second one has beautiful pictures, and the third one has everything about the board and its functions.

The board itself at first glance makes it clear that it has more than enough functions. There is not a single more or less free space on it, except for a place for an unsoldered SATA controller and its connectors. The big cooler on the northbridge chip, as well as the processor socket rotated 45 degrees relative to the usual position, immediately catches the eye. The processor power regulator consists of 12 capacitors, 8 of which have a capacity of 2200 uF each, the rest — 1200 uF each. Powerful.

The rear panel of the board is also impressive. On it, in addition to the standard PS / 2, LPT and COM, there are four USB ports, one FireWire port, RJ-45, five audio minijacks, and two SPDIF connectors: in and out. The network is provided by the RTL8100C chip, and the sound is provided by the new ALC658 codec, about the “six-channel” of which we don’t even want to talk, since everything is already clear in terms of the set of connectors. The board also has a µGuru chip, whose functions we will discuss later, and a two-digit indicator showing the progress of the initial self-test procedure. There are no microswitches on the board, and jumpers are responsible for standard functions, such as resetting BIOS Setup settings and USB bus power mode after turning off the PC.

No serious flaws were noticed in the layout of the board, everything that is needed is signed and explained, access to everything that is needed is provided, but what is on the board is a little cramped — so where to go, there are too many elements .

After digging into the BIOS of the board, you can change the following memory settings: CAS Latency Time, Active to Precharge delay, RAS to CAS Delay, RAS Precharge. You can tinker with overclocking, but in order to overclock the AI7 and its processor, there is a much more convenient tool — the very “little guru”, that is, the µGuru chip with the appropriate software set.

µGuru is essentially a second microprocessor on which the functions of monitoring, recording and configuring the board’s operation parameters lie. There is nothing special about all these functions, but the fact that they are implemented on a separate chip that does not need CPU resources is really interesting and new.

µGuru allows you to use six proprietary Abit technologies, each of which has a corresponding software tool: OC Guru, BlackBox, ABIT EQ, FanEQ, Audio EQ and FlashMenu. Abit EQ is a monitoring program that doesn’t stand out in any way, and allows you to monitor a standard set of voltages-velocities-temperatures, and warns you when some parameter is out of range. FlashMenu is a BIOS update utility that has become familiar to many motherboards directly from Windows. The name of the BlackBox utility speaks for itself — it is really a «black box» that collects information about the system for the «commission to investigate the causes of the disaster» — technical support. Collecting such a set of information (model, brand, operating frequency, driver version, etc.) on your own is long and dreary, so the utility can be really useful, but we, of course, wish you never to use it 😉 Audio EQ — a program for setting up the sound subsystem, which has both a pleasant interface and good options for actually setting it up. A ten-band equalizer, working with 3D sound technologies, auto-detection of devices — these are just a small part of the program’s capabilities. By the way, the ALC658 codec is very good, and if you do not write music, then there is no need for an external sound card.

FanEQ is a very interesting technology that allows you to control the speed of the fans. You set an upper and lower limit for the temperature of the device being cooled, be it a chipset or a video card, and the fan does its best if the temperature is close to the upper limit, and does nothing at all if the load is light and the temperature, respectively, too. Everything is done very simply, and if you are too lazy to fiddle with the settings, you can choose one of three fan operation modes: Cool, Quiet or Normal. Silence fans will be pleased.

And finally, the OC Guru utility, which, in our opinion, is the main highlight of the µGuru technology. It is designed to overclock the system directly from Windows. The following can be changed: FSB and AGP frequency, processor multiplier if it is unlocked, voltage of the processor, memory and AGP. If overclocking is successful, the parameters are entered into the BIOS Setup settings, and in the future the system will work in this mode, if unsuccessful, the system will automatically roll back to the old settings. It is clear that it does not always make sense to work on an overclocked system — for example, in games it is necessary in order to squeeze out another four frames per second, but when working in Word, it is absolutely useless. OC Guru also solves this problem — now for each type of application you can save certain settings, and to apply them, it will be enough to call the appropriate profile and click Apply. It seems that overclocking is becoming really massive, and therefore a very simple matter.

All these technologies work, if not flawlessly, then at least very well and without any problems (there are flaws in the work, but these are nothing more than normal errors of normal programs).