Abit Quality(specifically KT7A)

Oh come on! Somebody out there must have an opinion on Abit's stuff...Oh well...

Intel PII 266 MHz
128 MB PC66 SDRAM
STB Velocity 128
Maxtor 6.6 GB HDD
Ohh Yeah!

I dont think the abit is all that bad but I believe that the iwill is much more stable board.

SANDMAN

The more people will reply, the more opinions you will get. I had bad experience with A7V, took it back and got KT7A, works like a champ. I took the Abit board because it has an ISA slot for my URS modem which new Asus board are missing, otherwise would go with Asus again. It just had trouble to detect my DeskStar HD. I think the new ones don't have that problem. I had Abit with Pentiums all the time as well, running perfectly fine till now in all systems that I have sold 2-3 years ago. So there are some different opinions and experiences with different boards as you can see. By far I have Asus and Abit at home now, Abit with TB-900, Asus with P3-800, both work awesomely stable. Have no complaints.

K7 + KT7A + MX300 + VooDoo3000 = :smile:
P3 + CUSL2-C + MX300 + Asus7700 = :smile:

I have purchased the Abit's KT7RAID two months ago and had nothing but hell with it. Took me 3 weeks to get the system stable and all hardware to function. After two weeks of stability and removal of one of the hard drives and disabling of the second channel on the IDE all hell broke loose again. I have build around 1000 PCs in 10 years and NEVER had this many INSANE problems. Sure I can continue fixing stuff but that's not the point of having a system!

I'm going for the Iwill KK266 now. Hope it will be fine.

I started with an abit bh6 when the board first came out and used it specifically to overclock my cpu. I have never had any problems that were traced directly to the board. I am currently using an Abit KT7A and still think the board is excellent. I have tried SOYO boards and had nothing but problems but again like another post says opinions vary.

Two of my friend and I use Abit boards. One is a BP6 dual celeron with 466x2, the other is a KT7 with a tbird 900, mine is a SE6 with a 733 P3. None of us have had a problem with any of our boards. Mines been up almost 24/7 since august 2000. The dual celeron has been up for over two years. The Tbird was built back in December 2000. I have heard nothing but good things about Abit and their customer support is good if ya ever need them. I had to call them to figure out how to proper hook up the usb header on my board. They email me a diagram of what pins did what the same day. As far as Asus goes, Ive only had one board of theirs for any amount of time. Its an old SIS pentium board with a 233 MMX. It still runs great, I sold it to my aunt back in the summer of 99, i built it back in 97. So I say go with Asus or Abit.

The last time I tried to use my imagination, I ended up in a straight jacket!  

Purchased my KT7 in November. Up and running, and overclocking, in 45 minutes. (Took my time installing the heatsink). Couldn't figure out why I was getting resource conflicts from my sound card (ISA). Next day looked at the BIOS setup more carefully and discovered "Reset Configuration Data". After enabling this, Windows 98SE redected my sound card and everything worked great. My first 3D game crashed so I updated to Detonator 3, version 6.31 and I updated the Via 4-in-1 drivers to 4.24 (at the time). Went 3 months without any problems until...

I recently, I updated the BIOS to WZb01 and the Via drivers to 4.28a, just for the hell of it. Had problems and returned to Via 4.25a. Learned somewhere about VIA AGP driver version 4.05b which avoided "the problems of 4.28a 4-in-1 drivers". Downloaded these.

Everything seems to be working great again (and a little faster). However, I broke a cardinal rule. "If it ain't broken, don't fix it".

I know this sounds like it was more troublesome than it really was. The KT7 is a great board, though. It is also incredibly well supported by a third party, <A HREF="http://www.icrontic.com/faqs/kt7faq/kt7faq.htm" target="_new">Paul's Unofficial Abit KT7 FAQ</A>. There haven't been many BIOS updates but they haven't been need either.

KT7
Duron 600@900 mhz (1007 mhz during intense games)
Monster II HSF
128 mb of OCZ 'enhanced' PC-133, CAS 2/3/2, SDRAM
VisionTek Geforce 256 @130/185 (150/210 during intense games)
Maxtor DiamondMax 40 VL
Windows 98SE
More old stuff

Just put together two Duron 800 systems and one 1GHz T-bird system, all using KT7A. All three are completely stable and very fast.

I have an Abit kt7 and an Asus a7v. THe a7v took a month and a half to stabilize. The kt7 worked right off the bat.

Using Sandra benchmarks, my kt7 is a little faster than my a7v.