Abit KR7A-133R Motherboard

::First Impressions::

Upon recieving the board I was pretty much amazed at the quality that went into the packaging. The box has a pretty nifty design and even has a carrying handle. Alot of people might not care about the packaging but good packaging means less damaged products from rough rides on the brown truck, and like they say first impressions mean alot.

::What's inside::

Well lets open up the box and see what we get. Upon first inspection you will find everything nicely packaged inside of a plastic case. You will find everything that is normally included with all motherboards. one thing that you will notice is the extensiveness of the manual. The manual is very detailed unlike alot of others.


Here is a list of the items included:

• Motherboard
  
• Two 80-wire/40-pin ribbon cable / Ultra DMA 133, 100, 60, or 33 IDE devices
  
• One ribbon cable for 3.5" floppy disk devices
  
• CD containing drivers and utilities
  
• One USB 2 port rear plug adapter
  
• One DIY bag
  
• One user's manual for the motherboard
  
• One quick installation guide for the motherboard
  
• One floppy disk containing HPT 372 drivers

::The board itself::


As you can see from the pics above the board is laid out very nice. They had a protective cover on top of the socket to help keep away any debris from the socket. The only complaint that I had with this board is where the floppy connector is located. The case I use is an InWin Q500 full tower and the floppy drive is located all the way at the top. Well the board has the floppy connector located at the very bottom and a normal floppy cable that most of us have will not reach. Unless you have the same setup I have you should be alright, and this isn't that big of a deal considering you can pick up new cables fairly cheap.

::The Specs::

CPU:

• Support AMD Athlon XP 1500+ ~ 2000
  
• Support AMD Athlon 700MHz ~ 1.4GHz
  
• Support AMD Duron 600MHz ~ 1.2 GHz

Chipset:

• VIA KT266A / VIA VT8233A

Memory:

• Four 184-pin DIMM sockets support PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM module
  
• Supports 6 banks up to 3GB DRAMs for unbuffered DDR/SDR modules
  
• Supports 8 banks up to 3.5GB DRAMs for registered DDR/SDR modules

BIOS:

• SoftMenuTM III Technology to set CPU parameters
  
• Supports Plug-and-Play (PNP), Advanced Configuration Power Interface (ACPI), Desktop Management Interface (DMI), Write-Protect Anti-Virus function by AWARD BIOS

Functions:

• Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB
  
• Two Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to four Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133
  
• Two Channels of Bus Master IDE Ports supporting up to four Ultra DMA 33/66//100/133 (RAID 0/1/10)
  
• Two built-in 16550 fast UART compatible serial port connectors
  
• On board USB header for two extra USB channels

Miscellaneous:

• ATX form factor
  
• 1 AGP slot, 6 PCI slots
  
• Built-in Wake on LAN header, Wake on Ring header, IrDA TX/RX header
  
• Ultra DMA 133/RAID
  
• High Point HPT372 IDE Controller
  
• Ultra DMA 133MB/sec data transfer rate

::Final thoughts::

There isn't much to say other then this board is great. It has been very stable, very easy to overclock. My only complaint is what I mentioned earlier about the floppy cable. This is definately a good board for the money, and great for you overclockers out there. I gave the board a score of 9, only because of the floppy cable issue. If you have this board post your feedback because we wanna hear it. Let us know what you think of it.


Testing