As seems to be the fate of a great many of my components my motherboard seems to have croaked for no apparent reason. It's claiming that the processor is damaged, but having gone out and bought a new processor, I have to presume that somthing in the motherboard is damaged. In any case I'm now looking for a cheap replacement thats at about the same level, if not better than my previous mobo.

I had a MSI K7T266 Pro (VIA KT266 Chipset) which i was only half happy with, so I was wondering what people thought was the best bang for your buck when talking about an Athlon 1.4Ghz mobo

I think I'd prob like to stick with a VIA chipset as they tend to be faster, but as for manufacturor, i think someone other than MSI might be preferable.

Any input you can be give would be great, thanx

Abit KT7E or Asus A7V266E

how about the Gigabyte GA-7VTXH+ ?

Go for the ASUS A7V266-E or ABIT KR7a. KT333 isn't necessary right now, especially not with a TBird.

I am in a similar position, I'm in the market for a similar mobo. When I was looking to see what i could get, I couldn't help but notice that the Abit KR7a - Raid is going really cheap £53 at the time of writing (Thanks Didou :grinthumb ). It did blow some of the other mobo's out of the water when it was released too. I've had to make a rushed decision, but all the signs are pointing towards the Abit KR7a.

KT266a MoboReviews

KT266a Vs Others

given how well that ABIT did on Tom's Hardware and you claim to have found it for £53, could u tell me where that is??

aria

UK only i think.

looks like the £53 one only has ATA-100, seeing as i've got a reasonably fast HDD, i'm going to go with the faster ATA-133 controller, still at £83, its quite a good price

Didn't think of that but the Abit KR7a is a good choice, like the Asus in using either the 266 or 200 MHz bus.
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actually before i go and throw my £30 away, does anyone know what the difference between the ABIT KR7A-133 and the ABIT KR7A is exactly, is its just the ATA133 support, or does it actually have a different IDE controller?

u know what screw it, im gonna spend the extra £30 on fancy round IDE cables instead, the ABIT KR7A-RAID seems to do well on everyone's list, and my HDD can live at ATA100 speeds.

The exact difference is the the KR7a supports ATA133 on its HighPoint Chip. You can use it as a simple IDE controller or for RAID 0, 1, 0+1.

The KR7a-133 supports the same thing with its HighPoint controller but it also has the new VIA southbridge which also supports ATA-133 whereas the southbridge on the KR7a only supports ATA100.

There isn't any big difference between ATA100 & ATA133 even on a RAID 0 strip.

Conclusion : the KR7a can have 4 IDE devices in ATA133 & 4 in ATA100 while the KR7a-133 can have all 8 IDE devices in ATA133.

well seeing as i'm not expecting to have 8 ATA133 IDE devices any time soon, i'll save my money. Thanx for the info

you can run a 1.4GHz on a Abit KT7 w/ the bios upgrade. I'm running a 1.2GHz on mine.

I had the KT7, until i bought the KR7a-R, and it served me well. I had a 1.4 Athlon running in that (with the Bios upgrade) and had no problems at all, although it didn't like being clocked any higher. But now i've got DDR, mmmmm .