ABIT KT7-RAID Socket-A KT133 ATX

AnandTech Motherboard Rating

Performance

The KT7-RAID performs with the very best of the KT133 based motherboards. The number of tweaking options in the BIOS truly give the KT7-RAID the performance advantage over the competition. And if you're lucky enough to have two fast ATA/66 or ATA/100 drives, running them in RAID 0 mode will provide for a very noticeable increase in disk performance.

Price

The KT7-RAID loses out on its price, at over $200 the board is way too expensive to be paired with a sub $200 CPU. The bare KT7 is a bit more acceptable at around $170 - $190. But overall we're still dealing with some very high numbers.

Stability

Stability used to be ABIT's weak point, but their recent releases have been rock solid. They started this renewed focus on stability with the KA7, BX133-RAID and it continues here with the KT7-RAID.

Quality

ABIT's stability hasn't been the only thing that's improving, attention to quality detail such as using thermal compound on their chipset heatsink is a step in the right direction for ABIT.

Features

ABIT began as a company that was all about features, and unfortunately for a while there they seemed to lose sight of just that. The KT7-RAID, however, continues their recent return to tradition as it offers the best overall feature set of any KT133 motherboard. A completely jumperless multiplier/FSB/voltage setup, courtesy of SoftMenu III, a number of performance tweaking features in the BIOS and of course ATA/100 & RAID support set the KT7-RAID apart from the competition.

Layout

The KT7-RAID has the ideal layout for a KT133 motherboard, it has a plethora of expansion slots and was generally very well laid out. Unfortunately, the positioning of the Socket-A interface by the very edge of the motherboard does cause some frustrations.

Availability

Finding ABIT motherboards isn't a difficult task at all, most people have heard of them and when you have a large demand for a particular brand, you'll always find vendors that stock them.

Documentation & Software Bundle

ABIT has always had strong written documentation bundled with their motherboards.