12 Boards With VIA KT266A - Fastest Chipset For AMD & Duron
Abit KR7A / KR7A-133
Board Revision: ?
BIOS Version: Dec 27, 2001
We received Abit's KT266A motherboard too late, hence the update to this article.
The KR7A comes with six PCI slots, AGP 4x, ATA/100 standard controller plus IDE RAID controller, and four DIMM sockets for PC2100 DDR modules. Please note that if you insert double sided DIMMs, only three slots can be used. If you want to use all four, you will have to purchase registered DIMMs. However, four sockets are an excellent basis for large amounts of memory: theoretically, you could equip this motherboard with the maximum amout of RAM that is supported by the KT266A, which is 4 GB! The only problem could be to obtain 1 GB registered DDR DIMMs.
Thanks to Soft Menu III, all CPU-related parameters such as FSB clock, multiplier, CPU core voltage and some other timing values can be set directly within the BIOS. Generally, Abit has more items that can be manually configured than the other manufacturers.
The latest version of this motherboard is called KR7A-133 and already comes with HighPoint's new HPT372 chip, which supports ATA/133 RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD (drive spanning in order to use several drives as if they were only one). As this new chip has not been changed externally, motherboard companies can integrate it without changing current designs, which is what Abit is doing. Thus, the IDE connectors for this controller are in front of the PCI slots, which may cause problems if you want to use several large PCI cards.
In terms of performance and stability, the KR7A is an enjoyable product, as it runs fast and reliably. No application crashes, hang-ups or configuration problems occurred during our tests.
