ABIT KA7-100: “Bar None, the Best Athlon Platform” 

Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.  Friday, May 26^th , 2000—Game PC recently posted a fascinating article on ABIT’s brand-new KA7-100 mainboard that you definitely will not want to miss.  Not only is it one of the earliest reviews of the KA7-100 (second, by our count); it also provides unique information on this unique product. “ABIT has an impressive list of firsts, including the first jumperless overclocking motherboard, first BX board with Ultra DMA/66, and the first Dual Celeron motherboard, among others. People have come to expect the best new features from ABIT, and the company has done a fantastic job at creating just what the consumers were asking for.”

The original KA7 made waves when it was launched at the end of March, and it may have surprised some to see a new version so soon.  As Game PC points out, the big question is: “What's the "100" for, you ask? That would be the onboard ATA/100 controller that's now embedded right next to the other IDE ports. Once again, ABIT is the first to pioneer a new motherboard feature into the mainstream, as they're the first to get an ATA/100 based motherboard onto the market.”  As far as the quick succession of ABIT’s Athlon models goes, Game PC notes:  “ABIT couldn't have timed the release of this board better, as the same week we got this board we got the first ATA/100 compatible drives from IBM here in our offices.”

Certainly support for future specs would be enough to make the KA7-100 attractive for many of you. But then Game PC made an interesting discovery: “When snooping around the motherboards settings, we noticed that the Highpoint's BIOS screen had an "Evaluation Only" tag at the top of the screen. Intrigued, we wandered into the Highpoint BIOS and found an interesting feature, onboard ATA/100 RAID support. Amazingly, it appears the Highpoint 370 chipset supports not only ATA/100 standard disk support, but can support RAID 0 (Stripping) and RAID 1 (Mirroring)… We immediately set out to test these new features, and quickly set up an Ultra ATA/100 RAID setup with two IBM Deskstar 75GXP drives.”

Game PC sums their experiences with the KA7-100 as follows: “The layout is great, it's got innovative features, it's rock-solid stable, and even has additional RAID functionality built-in just to seal the deal. There's just not much more you can ask for with an Athlon board. The ABIT KA7-100 is bar none, the best Athlon platform we've ever had the pleasure of gracing our testbeds with.”

To read the entire review, go to:
http://www.gamepc.com/reviews/hardware_review.asp?review=ka7100&page=1

For more on ABIT and the KA7-100, go to:
http://www.abit.com.tw