Without a doubt I KNEW this would be the board I would buy to accompany my new Thunderbird Chip. I have always been an Abit fan, but of course this does not make my views biased. I did consider getting the Asus A7v, and reasons will be shown. What this review is about is why I bought the board, and what I think of it. Of course the KT7 and A7V are not the only two Duron/Thunderbird motherboards, but being the most popular ones I thought I would use these as examples.

What drew me to this board was firstly the want for RAID. Although this is a facility available via an add on card there is a price difference. The difference between the standard KT7 and the KT7-RAID is about £15. An add-on card is about £35. Because the Asus A7v does not officially support RAID, this would add an extra cost to buying an A7V (althought this can be added using a resistor mod, which most promise controller cards can do). The full A7v specs can be found here.

Another thing that drew me to this board is the fact that this board has chosen an ISA slot over an AMR. I use an old ISA 10MB network card to get my simple net access. If I had one with an AMR slot it would be another £20 to add to the cost.

I am not in any-way saying the A7V is a bad board, in fact (later discussed), there are some things it has over the KT7.

In a review written by an RMA technician, he slates this board and says all other reviews have been done on specially hand-picked boards direct from Abit. I PAID FOR THIS BOARD. It came straight out of the warehouse at Aria and into my hands. I myself am very pleased with this board.

When the board arrived, the first thing I noticed when I unpacked the board was the quality of cooling on the chipset. If you take a look at most BX chipsets they have what is famously known as a "greenie" on top for cooling with if your lucky a nasty thermal pad. This chipset had not only active cooling (a fan), but thermal paste! Although the thermal paste was not spread particularly well, I was still impressed.

The board comes with the usuall variety of things such as IDE, ATA/100 cables e.t.c But one I have never seen with a motherboard (except AT's) is an EXTRA 2 usb ports as well as the two already on the motherboard.

The position of the socket was very good in my case. My case has a PSU with a grill for a base. The air is coming straight out of the Alpha PAL6035 and into the power supply where it is expelled. This would help with case temperatures.

The cpu diode underneath actually poked out at first. Abit have obviously realised that AMD chips need careful monitoring, so my making it stick out, it is pushed down with the chip giving it the ultimate contact to the chip.

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