Abit
KA7 Slot A review
Posted by Julio
Franco on July 19, 2000 - Page 3/5
Company: Abit
Product: KA7
Slot A motherboard
Installation & Impressions
The installation of the KA7 went really smooth, with the
exception of an incompatibility I found with the USB
connectors. I’m not totally sure if it’s a chipset or
motherboard specific related problem but not even using the
latest drivers/BIOS I could get it solved. When I connect my
USB digital camera and I’m using my modem I will get most
of the time the blue screen of death. That never happened
before with the BX chipset (Pentium III platform). Other
than that I can say the board is really stable.
When I first looked at the motherboard I noticed that the
power supply connector has been moved to a much more
accessible place, using the huge Alpha P125 cooler on the
Athlon I didn’t have any space problems with the power
connector.
Another of the basic features that stand out of the KA7
would be the slot combination, with 1 AGP, 6 PCI and 1 ISA (PCI
shared) slot it’s for sure you have lot of room for
expansion, the absence of an AMR slot is not something I
really took care of much as I don’t have any peripherals
that use one.
Overclocking
After booting up and get everything in place with the
chipset drivers, I quickly restarted and started to play
around with the extra BIOS settings found in SoftMenu III.
I’m using an Athlon 500mhz with an Afterburner mod, which
usually would take my processor running at 800mhz,
unfortunately for some reason the mod card got damaged and
I’ve been unable of overclocking my processor that much, I
still wanted to see what the BIOS features could do for me.
Using the standard voltage settings I could get my processor
running at 550mhz on a 110mhz bus, the improvement was very
noticeable as I’m using a GeForce 2 and I’m sure
scalability with that card is great and will take advantage
of just about every bit of CPU performance possible.
I couldn’t get any higher/stable combination
but there was still one thing left to do. As we all know the
KX133 chipset has the ability of running your memory on a
133mhz bus independently from the processor speed. I
didn’t think I was going to be able to use this feature
since I just have PC100 memory but as you will see on the
benchmarks later on, I was able to pump the memory speed up
to 133mhz with the only disadvantage that I had to go back
to the 100mhz bus (so the processor was running at the
standard 500mhz) to do so.
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