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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on December 07, 2001
Manufacturer: Abit Product:
KG7-RAID Socket A Motherboard
As
you probably already know, VIA aren’t exactly reputed for
their high quality products (Well, stable &
uncompromising anyway), with their Chipsets having problems
with running in AGP X4 mode, being most prominent in
Motherboards that had issues with Soundcards crackling &
other well documented issues. In the case of the KG7 RAID it
uses the VIA686B Southbridge to provide standard IDE
connectivity (With the RAID controller providing another 2
IDE Channels as well). This provides up to ATA 100 support
for IDE devices, although there was some cause for concern
with this Chipset & data corruption, as explained on VIA
Hardware, although I’ll examine this more later.
Thankfully,
rather than using a VIA Northbridge the KG7 RAID instead
uses the AMD 761. The AMD-761 system controller features the
AMD Athlon system bus, DDR-SDRAM system memory controller,
accelerated graphics port (AGP4X) controller &
peripheral component interconnect (PCI) bus controller. So
how well do these co-exist?
Surprisingly
well, indeed. In all my time using the KG7 RAID in Windows
XP it behaved well using just the Drivers on the XP CD. I
ended downloading a new XP compatible IDE Driver from VIA
later, though. Unfortunately, while it worked just fine IDE
devices were than detected as SCSI & upon uninstalling
the VIA IDE Driver I had severe problems, with Device
manager listing several devices that shouldn’t be there,
e.g. Other than the Highpoint RAID controller, it also
detected an SCSI one. As a result I ended up reformatting
& reinstalling XP. Other than that early mishap (&
never going near VIA Drivers again) the Motherboard worked
quite perfectly.
For
both, regular Desktop usage or 3D Gaming the system was
quite stable. I could literally leave the PC on for hours
& know it would still be running the same task as
expected (Which I tried, looping a Quake 3 timedemo). As
regards the data corruption mentioned earlier on, I also
encountered no such problems (Copying large files from one
partition to another, or from a CD to the Hard Drive while
playing MP3s & such). The Creative Audigy Player I use
similarly encountered no problems, or crackling as you may
know it as ;).
Upon
receiving & installing the Creative 3D Blaster Geforce 3
Titanium 200 I set about setting the AGP Transfer mode
in the BIOS to AGP 4X & Enabled Fast
writes support. Rather than encountering problems with
this combination the AMD 761 Northbridge handled it all in
its stride & I’ve encountered no problems in Games or
other 3D applications. In fact the one time I had a problem
was on the desktop when it auto-rebooted.
Other
than this the VIA 686B Southbridge & AMD 761 Northbridge
made a great combination. Later on I’ll examine the
performance, but for now I can happily say that the VIA 686B
& AMD 761 made a great combination.
The KG7 RAID features
a Highpoint Technologies HPT 370A controller, which can be
used to provide connectivity for up to 4 extra IDE devices,
or for providing RAID 0/1/0+1 functionality for Hard Drives.
RAID is a technique used to configure multiple Hard drives
for improved performance or data integrity as compared with
single Hard Drive solutions. The HPT 370A Chipset present on
the KG7 RAID supports 3 modes of operation. Which mode to
use will b limited to a certain extent by the Hard drives
you have. It is preferable though that you have identical
Hard drives should you intend to setup a RAID configuration
of any type. Here’s a quick run down of the different
modes available;
RAID
0. Commonly known as Striping. 2 Hard drives are needed
for this & all Data will be split evenly across
both Hard drives, which in theory will result in twice the
performance (Data can be simultaneously read/wrote on both
Drives, rather than on only a single one). In the case of
RAID 0 the Hard drive space available is limited to the
smallest Hard drive available, e.g. were you using 4
Gigabyte & 10 Gigabyte ATA 100 Hard drives then for RAID
purposes only 4 Gigabytes will be available. There is no
data integrity in this mode, e.g. if one Hard drive
breaks/fails then the other will not be usable in its
current state either.
RAID
1. Commonly known as Mirroring. Whereas RAID 0 was a
performance oriented mode, RAID 1 is a data integrity mode.
Again 2 Hard drives are required. In this case, data is
mirrored on both Hard Drives, which means that in the event
of one Drive failing the other can be used without issue –
no data will be lost. Again, the Hard drive space available
is limited to the smallest Hard drive available, e.g. were
you using 4 Gigabyte & 10 Gigabyte ATA 100 Hard drives
then for RAID purposes only 4 Gigabytes will be available.
RAID
0 + 1. This combines the advantages of both RAID 0 &
RAID 1, i.e. improved performance by Striping & data
integrity via Mirroring. 4 Hard drives are required for this
mode.
Unfortunately I only
have a single ATA 100 Hard Drive & thus was unable to
test out RAID functionality with the Motherboard. Although
as you’ll see later on an ATA 100 RAID 0 array performed
about 60% faster in SiSoft Sandra.
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