Abit KT7E Motherboard
May 13th, 2001 | By Archive
Abit KT7E Motherboard
Date
: 05/13/01 – 03:48:37 AM
Author
:
Category
: Motherboard
Manufacturer: Abit
Price: cheaper than the KT7A, probably around $100 (?)
Thanks to Joost from Abit for supplying us with the Abit KT7E motherboard!
Introduction
Today, Overclockers Online brings YOU a review of the ‘infamous’ (??) Abit KT7E. Now, why can this new board be considered as something special? Well, simply because the KT7E sports the mysterious VIA KT133E chipset.
There have been quite a few rumours and speculations about this chipset the past few months. Even @ the CeBIT trade fair in Hannover, everybody was really just speculating about what this KT133E chipset would/could actually do. Some important and well-known persons on the hardware market (I’m not going to mention names here folks) who claimed to know everything about the KT133E, turned out to be completely wrong about its specs! Heck … who can blaim these guys? There’s not even one sentence on the VIA homepage that has the word KT133E in it. If we had to believe the rumours on the street the past few months, this KT133E chipset just had to be nothing more / nothing less than a slightly modified KT133 chipset. But in fact, that statement is far from being true!
So what exactly IS the VIA KT133E chipset? Well, the KT133E can be compared to the famous KT133A chipset but without official 133MHz FSB support. You’ll find out later in this review that the FSB on our Abit KT7E even went up a ‘little’ higher than 133MHz, so I’m thinking … Man, what’s all this ‘no official 133MHz FSB support’ crap?? One other interesting thing there is to know about the KT133E chipset is that it’s quite a bit cheaper than the KT133A. Doesn’t that sound tempting for manufacturers of low budget mainboards? :-)
We hope all the mistery around this ‘low end’ Abit KT7E motherboard will cleared and that your questions about the VIA KT133E chipset will be answered in the following review… let’s continue with some specs!
Specifications
Here’s the KT7E’s entire spec list (copy / paste from the Abit website) :
CPU
1.Support AMD Duron 600MHz ~ 850 MHz or future Socket A Processors based on 200 MHz
2.Support AMD Athlon 700MHz ~ 1.2GHz or future Socket A Processors based on 200 MHz
3.Support 200 MHz Alpha EV6 bus for the AMD Athlon & Duron processors Supports
Chipset
1.VIA KT133E /VIA 686B
2.Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)
3.Supports AGP 2X/4X
4.Supports 100/133MHz Memory Bus Settings
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.SoftMenuIII Technology to set CPU parameters
2.Award Plug and Play BIOS
3.Write-Protect Anti-Virus function by AWARD BIOS
Multi I/O Functions
1.2 Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports support Ultra DMA 33/66/100
2.PS/2 Keyboard and PS/2 Mouse Connectors
3.1 Floppy Port (up to 2.88MB)
4.1 Parallel Port (EPP/ECP)
5.2 Serial Ports
6.On board USB header for two extra USB channels
Miscellaneous
1.ATX form factor
2.1 AGP slot, 6 PCI slots and 1 ISA slot
3.Hardware monitoring – Including Fan speed, Voltages, System environment temperature
4.Built-in Wake on LAN header
5.Built-in Wake on Ring header
6.Built-in IrDA TX/RX header
Now let’s have a closer look at the specs …
The Specs In Detail
If you read the specs on the Abit homepage or the ones above, you will already know that the KT7E supports up to 1.5GB of PC100/PC133 SDRAM in 3 DIMM sockets next to the CPU socket. Nothing different from the KT7A (RAID) motherboards …
When you take your first look at the Abit KT7E mainboard, the first thing you will say is : ‘Woooow’ This board has a beautiful blue PCB folks! Take a look at the pics and be amazed by its beauty :) When you take a closer look at the board, you will see that it’s actually pretty much the same board as the Abit KT7A (KT133A without RAID) but then with the blue PCB instead of the normal ‘boring’ color! Now, why does Abit have decided to create the KT7E on a blue PCB anyway? Isn’t the KT7E supposed to be their low end board? How the hell do I know? What I do know is that the blue PCB makes this board look far from being low end.
You’ll probably know by now that the heart of the KT7E is the VIA KT133E chipset. Now I’m going to ask you to take a good look at the spec list above and tell me what you see … alright I will tell you what I find really weird. The KT7E spec list says : ‘Support 200 MHz Alpha EV6 bus for the AMD Athlon & Duron processors’ and ‘Supports 100/133MHz Memory Bus Settings’. So my question is : What’s the difference with the Abit KT7 motherboard based on the KT133 chipset? Well, you will soon find out that ‘Support
200/266MHz
Alpha EV6 bus’ would be a much better sentence!!
The KT7E also uses the VIA 686B Southbridge and features native UDMA/100 support. Note that the KT7E does NOT come with an onboard High Point RAID controller which is quite understandable because this is supposed to be a low end board. This might be a reason for a manufacturer to decide to equip onboard sound, but for Abit it isn’t as they want to keep the cost down to an absolute minimum.
The KT7E has an AGP slot,6 PCIs and an ISA slot. The package still contains a well-written manual as well as a 80 pin IDE cable, a FDD cable and a driver CD but that’s about it. You will not find a bonus virusscanner in this box, again because Abit wants this board to be as cheap as possible.
And what about the system BIOS? Well, nothing new here actually. Following the true Abit style, the KT7E BIOS also features SoftMenu III to set the CPU parameters like FSB speed, multiplier, core voltage and so on. The Advanced tab in the BIOS also allowed us to enable 4-way memory interleaving with the utmost easy. As a matter of fact, all the tweaking and overclocking options that can be found on the KT7A mobo can also be located on this KT7E :))
Now let me show you why this board is indeed very different from the KT7 with its KT133 chipset! It’s actually comparable to a KT7A (KT133A chipset) up to a certain level …
The Fun Part : Overclocking
To see what this KT7E and the VIA KT133E chipset is up to, I decided to use a Duron 850 that is able to run at a rockstable 1.1GHz+ … To make sure the SDRAM isn’t acting as a bottleneck in our setup, I decided to use OCZ Performance Max SDRAM which is tested stable up to 175MHz CAS3. Although the specs tells you that the KT7E only supports 100MHz FSB speeds (200MHz DDR), I was able to run a 133MHZ FSB (266MHz DDR) with ease!
I even dared to push the KT133E on this mobo even further and the pushing only stopped when I reached a 146MHz FSB! I could POST using a 147MHz but I experienced crashes during the Win2k startup. That’s when I realised that the KT7E and/or the KT133E chipset had reached their limit. But by using a 146MHz FSB, I was able to run my Duron 850 @ a rockstable 1095MHz (7.5 x 146MHz). My question to Abit is : ‘Who will buy a more expensive KT7(A) (non-RAID) if the KT7E performs this good?’
Benchmarking
System setup
- AOpen HQ45 case
- Abit KT7E motherboard
- OCZ Gladiator cooler
- AMD Duron 850
- 128MB OCZ Performance Max SDRAM
- Western Digital UDMA100 20GB 7200RPM hard drive
- Hercules GeForce 2 GTS
- Win2k + SP1
- DirectX 8a + Detonator 6.50 + VIA 4.29 4in1
I ran some Sisoft Sandra 2001 Pro benches as wel as a Quake 3 Arena timedemo using a 146MHz (max. FSB) to see what this mofo is up to. I also ran the same benchmarks using a 133MHz FSB (Duron 850 @ 1GHz) because this way we can compare some Sandra results with some benchmark results from the ABIT KT7A-RAID & ASUS A7V133 we reviewed earlier.
Now let’s head on to the benchmark results, shall we?
Sisoft Sandra 2001 Pro
Memory Benchmark
These Sisoft Sandra memory benchmarks shows us that the KT7E performs on the par with the more expensive high end KT7A motherboard from Abit. Now I still don’t understand why one should bye a more expensive KT7A instead of this KT7E …
CPU Benchmark & Multimedia Benchmark
Due to possible compatability issues between the KT7E mobo (or KT133E chipset??) and the Sisoft Sandra Benchmark suite, we couldn’t get accurate and realistic results on the CPU and multimedia benchmarks … unless you call a score of over 50000 MIPS in the CPU benchmark realistic of course :] Remember that we’re using a Duron 850, NOT a Duron 10GHz …
Here are some snapshots of Sandra’s CPU & MMX benchmarks :
We are investigating this matter together with the peeps from Abit.
Quake 3 Arena v1.17 Timedemo 1
Again, the KT7E proves to be a worthy contender in a battle against the current top of notch KT133A mainboard. Or don’t you think 150 frames per second is good enough ;)
Good
- SoftMenu III
- Pretty blue PCB
- 146MHz FSB
- Overclocking & Tweaking Options
- 200% Stable
- VIA 686B sporting UDMA/100
- Cheaper than the KT7/KT7A
- Not really low end
Bad
- No onboard RAID (don’t know if this is really that bad)
- No onboard sound
- ‘only’ 146MHz FSB :p
Conclusion
Because the Abit KT7E is the only KT133E chipset based mainboard on the at the moment, we can’t compare its performance to a KT133E based board from another manufacturer YET! As our review almost reaches its end, a couple of important questions remain … 1) Why is the KT133E cheaper than the KT133A? 2) Why is Abit the only manufacturer (at this moment) that could/would make a KT133E based motherboard? 3) Why should you even consider buying a KT7A mobo if the KT7E is cheaper and performs this good? (unless you want onboard RAID and a 150MHz FSB of course)
In other words, Abit has again done a mighty fine job with its KT7E. They’ve kept the same good old KT7 PCB design and they added the KT133E chipset to it. This combination makes the KT7E a real champion … it’s going to be cheaper than the KT7A, has the same power, stability and tweaking options and looks damn sexy with the blue PCB. What more could we ask for?
Alright folks, I have one small sentence left for you about this ABIT KT7E mobo : ‘Low end board … yeah right!’