The most talked about motherboard in the popular press has finally arrived in our labs, and after exhaustive testing we are now ready to disclose the results for the Abit KA7 motherboard.

The KA7 integrates the latest and greatest VIA Apollo KX133 - (see Fig 1) chipset combination currently available VT8371 North Bridge and VT82C686A South Bridge Controllers - (see Fig 2). The chipset brings AGP4X, PC133, a 200Mhz Front Side Bus, and ATA-66 technologies to the AMD-Athlon processor platform. Does Abit stop there? oh no, not Abit they have gone even further and made allowance's for the up and coming ATA-100 chipset from Highpoint and 2 x extra IDE connectors to allow a massive 8 IDE device connectivity at a later date. It is important to understand the Highpoint ATA-100 chipset will not be available for a while and in any case, no hard disk drives for this technology have yet been announced, so it is going to be a while before we see ATA-100.

Abit has put a lot of thought into the design aspect of the Motherboard from the layout point of view incorporating 4 DIMM slots, allowing for 2Gb of SDRAM fully populated. To provide stability they have included a 6-chip data buffer set from Texas Instruments - (see Fig 3), this is not new however, as Abit has implemented this in their previous BX boards, with great success.

The KA7 Motherboard was tested using entry-level components to see how they all faired up to the job of allowing us to squeeze every last bit of performance from the system without compromising in other areas.

The components used were as follows: -

1 x Athlon K7- 750Mhz Processor
1 x 128Mb of SDRAM PC133 7ns Hitachi/3rd Memory
1 x Guillemot 3D Prophet 32Mb GE-Force 256 Video Card
1 x IBM 34.5GB UDMA/66 7200rpm Hard Drive
1 x Samsung 48X UDMA/33 CD-ROM
1 x 3.5" 1.44Mg FDD

We installed Windows 98 without any problems. After installing the Abit drivers that came with the board, everything was recognised correctly and we continued to install the rest of the drivers. The motherboard was set exactly as it came out of the box, the only thing needing to be set was the CPU which was set to 7.5 x 100MHz, so the CPU was running at its default settings. The system was perfectly stable as should be expected and turned in a great score of 144 on SYSmark 2000, this score compares to some reviews published in popular computer magazines with AMD K7-850 based systems.

Not satisfied we thought we better have a look at the BIOS settings. After setting everything to its optimum and benchmarking again, we got a score of 152 which is an increase of 6% approx. in overall performance giving an excellent score on a AMD K7-750 CPU based system. At this stage we were convinced this was no ordinary Motherboard, we were in for a surprise.

Those of you familiar with Abit's range of motherboards will know the BE6-II (see our previous review) had the inclusion of the SoftMenu III. This little baby is versatile to the extreme, allowing you to set the FSB totally through software, increasing or decreasing the MHz one at a time. No more hoping that the CPU will run jumping the FSB from 66 to 75 to 83, you can try every one in between and above.

As you will see from the chart below, our first attempt at overclocking was to push the Athlon 750 to 840 and testing solidly for 3 hrs resulted in a performance increase and solid stability. Raising the clock to 855 gave the same results however, we discovered this was really the optimum level of overclocking without compromising reliability and the pain of rebooting due to hang up's. We did however manage to push the CPU to the extreme limit of 1005MHz and would advise you not to try this at home; especially if you are faint hearted. The pre-requisite for overclocking to 855 is to ensure the memory you use is of high quality and supports CAS 2 latency, this is imperative and without it you will barely be able to go above 840.

Overclocking, can take away the pleasure of using a motherboard which already has quality and performance built in with reliability, fortunately the KA7 gives you the best of both worlds, and as such we were highly impressed with Abit's offering for the Athlon range of processors.

It is not often we receive a product in our labs, which causes such interest as the KA7 has done, quite rightly too. The KA7 screams quality at you as it stamps it's authority on design layout, flexibility, overclocker's dream, and most of all stability. Abit has once again set the standard which others have to follow. We have no hesitation in recommending the KA7 and it walks away with our first ever-double award - Excellence and Performance. Well done! Abit.