Abit KT7A RAID Motherboard
Feb 6th, 2001 | By Archive
Abit KT7A RAID Motherboard
Date
: 02/6/01 – 07:41:02 PM
Author
:
Category
: Motherboard
Manufacturer: Abit
Price:$220
Thanks to Abit and MPL for supplying us with both the KT7A and the KT7A-RAID!
Introduction
A few weeks ago, VIA released the successor of the KT133 chipset: the KT133A. The KT133A is exactely the same as the KT133 but it features 133MHz Front Side Bus support and some other small tweaks and bugfixes. Why does VIA releases a new revision of the KT133 when DDR memory and DDR chipsets are just around the corner?
Easy … a lot of people own SDRAM and most of them don’t feel like throwing it all out and buy new DDR memory. The 133MHz bus speed gives you more performance for little money because now you can run your 1GHz TBird @ 7.5x133MHz instead of 10x100MHz it was running before. And because all AMD cpu’s can be unlocked pretty easy with the pencil trick, this conversion shouldn’t be too hard.
It was no secret that the KT133 was not able to perform stable above 110MHz FSB (not counting the few people who ran at 115MHz or sometimes 120MHz). The KT133A can easily run your cpu at a 133MHz FSB resulting in a 266MHz internal bus speed (thanks to the AMD DDR bus).
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This makes the KT133A an excellent performer and a perfect replacement for the KT133 chipset. Benchmarks also show that the KT133A performance comes very close to DDR memory, which makes the KT133A the perfect solution for people who are looking for a motherboard to run their socket A cpu on, but who do not want to go out and buy new memory.
The KT7A is Abit’s KT133A board which has to replace the original KT7 which we reviewed here.
Specifications
AMD Socket A Based ATX Mainboard With Ultra DMA 100 & SoftMenuTMIII Technology
ABIT’s Socket A motherboard is now even better. Already offering 3 DIMM, 1 AGP, 1 ISA, and 6 PCI, the KT7A-RAID now also adds support for 200MHz and 266MHz FSB. The KT7A-RAID has everything you could want in a top-of-the-line mainboard. If that isn’t enough, add in Ultra DMA 100 and RAID support and ABIT’s SoftMenuTM III. Your demands were heard, met and then surpassed with the KT7A-RAID.
CPU
1. Supports AMD-K7 Duron 600MHZ-850MHZ or future 200MHz FSB Socket A Processors
2. Supports AMD-K7 Athlon 700MHZ-1.2GHZ or future 266MHz FSB Socket A Processors
3. Supports 200/266 MHz Alpha EV6 bus for the AMD Athlon & Duron Processors
Chipset
1. VIA KT133A /VIA 686B
2. Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)
3. Supports AGP 2X/4X (Sideband)
4. Supports 100/133MHz Memory Bus Settings
Ultra DMA 100
1. High Point HTP370 IDE Controller
2. Ultra DMA 100MB/Sec data transfer rate
3. RAID 0(stripping mode for boosting performance)
4. RAID 1 (mirroring mode for data security)
5. RAID 0 +1(stripping and mirroring)
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. SOFTMENUTM III Technology to set CPU parameters
2. Award Plug and Play BIOS
3. Write-Protect Anti-Virus function by AWARD BIOS
4. Year 2000 Compliant
Multi I/O Functions
1. Two Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to four Ultra DMA 33/66/100(up to 4 HDD devices)
2. Two Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to four Ultra DMA 33
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
Miscellaneous
1. ATX form factor
2. 1 AGP slot, 6 PCI slots and 1 ISA slots
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
As you can see, the KT7A (RAID) has the same features as the KT7 (RAID). The most important specs are Soft Menu III, 6 PCI slots and the onboard RAID on the KT7A-RAID.
The board does not come with onboard sound or video, just like it’s precedessor, which is a good thing! Those features are almost never used and only increase the price you have to pay for your motherboard.
Abit decided to install the WW BIOS by default, which means this board features the cpu fan safety. This means that when the motherboard does not detect a fan on the cpu fan header or when the fan is not rotating between 2000 and 5500rpm, it will shut down the computer.
This might be a bit of a hassle in case you are using a 7000rpm fan like the one that comes with the FOP38 or if you are using watercooling. Your computer will shut down and there isn’t anything wrong … But lucky for us Abit’s latest beta BIOS WZ is able to disable this safety so you won’t have any problems with it :). Still this feature is interesting for non tweakers and people who don’t open up there computer case every week ;). Abit does include a warning paper in their box to alert people of this feature. I guess they just got too many ‘defective’ board back heh ;)) …
Please note that the KT7A comes with 4 (!!) onboard fan headers, which is very rare. Abit clearly designed this motherboard with overclockers in mind since they know we need a lot of fans in our rigs ;).
The BIOS – Soft Menu III
Back in time when the BH6 and the Celeron 300A were king of the world, Abit had a godlike status because of their very tweakable Soft Menu which let users alter the Front Side Bus, core voltage and various other settings from within the BIOS.
Today, Abit is still known as manufacturer of one of the best BIOS’ out there. They call it Soft Menu III now since it has evolved a lot and even more features were added into it.
The KT7A offers a wide selection of FSB’s from 100Mhz all the way up to 183MHz. The system they have chosen to use is a bit ‘rare’ and works like this. First you select a predefined speed from the following list: 100 / 101 / 103 / 105 / 107 / 110 / 112 / 115 / 117 / 120 / 122 / 124 / 127 / 130 / 133 / 136 / 140 / 145 / 150 and 155 MHz. After that you have another setting called ‘CPU FSB Plus’ in which you can enter a number between 0-28MHz. The number you enter here is added to the FSB and that way you can up the FSB in 1MHz increments.
As always, Abit has included the possibility to change the core voltage and the I/O voltage. The maximum setting for the core voltage is 1.85v and the I/O voltage can be set all the way up to 3.90v in 0.1v steps. This should help you overclock your cpu and add stability to your system. It’s a pitty Abit stopped at 1.85v because sometimes 1.90v or 1.95v would let you take the cpu a step further. I can see why Abit decided against it because not so expierenced users might cook their prescious cpu this way … but for the die-hard overclockers who know what they are doing, this would be a welcome feature.
Apart from all the voltage tweaks and FSB options, Abit inserted a lot of memory options as well. Thanks to settings like 4-way interleaving, CAS settings and some other options you can get the most out of your memory! If you don’t have these options in the BIOS, you can always enable them with the help of a good program from H.Oda.
Of course the monitoring of the Winbond chip is still present and gives you a wide variety of stuff to monitor like CPU temperature, case temperature, all the voltages, fan rpm’s, …
Overclocking
To see what the KT133A chipset is up to, I decided to use my Duron 600 that can do 1045MHz rockstable. I always ran this cpu @ 9.5x110MHz and I set the memory to HOST CLK + PCI CLK which resulted in a memory speed of 146MHz. As you can see the cpu and the memory are not running synchronized which results in a small performance loss.
The KT133A does support FSB’s higher then 110MHz so I was able to run the cpu @ 7x146MHz making the Duron run at 1022MHz. Of course the cpu has another 20MHz left of power so if your ram can take it you could run the cpu at 7x150MHz giving an additional 5MHz of memory speed and 25MHz of processor power :).
In order to see if the KT133A would support even higher FSB speeds, I used some Mushkin PC150 memory and OCZ PC175 memory and tested how high I could get the FSB before it freaked out. I ended up at 156MHz with both sticks, which is normal for the Mushkin ram as it is maxed out but the OCZ ram can take a lot more. So I must conclude that the KT133A chipset’s limit has been reached. Maybe if I replaced the default heatsink + fan that Abit puts on top of the North Bridge, I would have gotten a few MHz more, but I decided against it as it would not give me any noticable difference. I was able to boot at 160MHz FSB, but the system would not load Windows :(.
Just as the KT7, the KT7A is extremely stable and performs just fine in all stability tests I ran on it.
Benchmarking
In order to show of the performance of the KT133A chipset, several benchmarksuites were run on the testsystem.
System Setup
- Abit KT7A (RAID)
- AMD Duron 600 @ 1000MHz
- 256MB Mushkin PC133 RAM and 128MB OCZ Max Performance RAM
- Guillemot Hercules Geforce GTS Ultra
- IBM 34GB UDMA100 7200rpm hard drive
- Windows 2000 + SP1 + VIA 4in1 4.25a + nVidia 6.49 Detonator drivers
Sisoft Sandra Pro
CPU Benchmark
Multimedia CPU Benchmark
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Memory Benchmark
HDD Benchmark
Quake 3: Arena
Conclusion
The KT7A (RAID) is a very stable and tweakable motherboard just as its older brother the KT7 (RAID). If you are looking for a good socket A motherboard that will help you overclock as much as possible, then the KT7A (RAID) is what you need. If you already own a KT133 based board, I think you should not go out and spend all that hard earned $$$ on the KT133A because the small improvements you’ll get are not worth the money you have to pay for it!
Good
- Soft Menu III
- Onboard RAID (on the RAID version)
- Stability and performance
- Flash Menu
Bad
- 1.85v max core voltage
- Some FSB’s are not right -) you select 137MHz FSB and the board will use 138MHz (can be fixed by setting the board to 133MHz and adding 4MHz with the FSB Plus setting)
- Super Orb and Chrome Orb won’t fit (you need the smaller versions)