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It's been a long time coming, an Athlon board from Abit. It was a little dissapointing to see them sitting on the sidelines during the original round of Athlon boards based upon AMD's 750 chipset. However, they've joined the fray now in this second round of boards, based on VIA's KX133 chipset. For many, Abit represent the masters of tweakability with their Softmenu II and III equipped motherboards. Their BH6 and BX6 were the mainstay of Celeron overclocking for a long time, the more recent BE6-II and BF6 allowed massive tweakability with SoftMenu III and their dual-ppga BP6 is in a class of it's own. So tweaksters worldwide, myself included, have been eagerly anticipating Abit's move into the Athlon motherboard market and now, with their launch of the KA7 and KA7-100, the wait is over. Lets see if it was worth it..

click for bigger pic

Layout and Features
The first thing that struck me about the board is what is MISSING from it. No onboard sound, despite native support in the chipset, and no AMR slot. These are both positive things, to me, because it should lower the cost of the board and there's no way I'd use those features anyway. For a longer dissertation on my feelings about onboard sound and AMR, check my recent review of the Asus K7V here. This leaves room for another PCI slot, bringing the board to a total of 6, with an ISA slot and AGP slot rounding it out. The AGP slot is NOT an AGP Pro slot as found on the K7V, but it does support 4X and Fast-Writes.

4 SDRAM slots are present for a total of 2GB memory supported (good luck finding those 512MB DIMMS). Abit have included their 6-chip "data buffer", visible next to the first RAM slot, which apparently improves the stability of the SDRAM subsystem. 4 fan headers is a welcome sight, 2 of which are intelligent and support RPM monitoring/adjustment. The Athlon doesn't have a thermal diode in the core, so no motherboards can monitor the exact CPU temperature. There's a thermal sensor on the KA7 which gives you an indication of air temperature inside your case and a header for attaching a thermistor - which Abit include in the box, nice one - this can be attached to the heatsink or slid up next to the CPU slug, or anything else you feel like monitoring. The board has 2 backplate USB headers as per usual, with a header for an additional 2 ports on a separate panel, similar to the K7V. This panel is not provided with the KA7. The board also has the usual IRDA, Wake-On-Lan, Wake-On-Modem and SMB connectors. Finally, it has a CMOS discharge jumper (notably absent on the K7V), very useful as a last-resort recovery from too-optimistic BIOS settings.

There are some interesting spaces marked out on the PCB - a couple of additional hard drive headers and a square chip. These we now know are populated on the KA7's big brother, the KA7-100, with a HighPoint ATA-100 adapter and 2 ATA-100 headers. The unit I have here is the plain KA7, identical in every other respect. The 2 standard headers support a total of 4 IDE devices, up to ATA-66 spec.

Apart from that, the board is fairly roomy with lots of space between the SlotA and the first DIMM bank. The power plug is right on the top edge so there should be no problems mounting large coolers on this board. The northbridge has a standard "Greenie" heatsink attached both with the normal plastic lugs and, unusally, thermal tape. This seems to work pretty well - the greenie becomes quite warm during use - but historically we've always seen an improvement in thermal transfer by removing thermal tape and using some decent silicone-based paste. The location of the IDE headers means they might be fiddly to get at in a minitower - drives in the lower drive bays will be in the way - and 2 of the RAM slots are close enough to the AGP slot that the clips will touch the video card when open. Fiddly, a little irritating, but nothing major.

One dissapointing thing: I had fantasised that Abit would provide an on-board GFD connector and GFD with this motherboard, so you could adjust the multiplier from the BIOS. This didn't happen - perhaps a technical issue, perhaps worried about tipping their hat too far in the direction of overclockers. Anyway, this is just a fantasy that didn't come true (on any board) so you can't blame Abit for it.

The overall impression from the feature set and layout is that Abit intend this board for the tweaker market. OEM's will probably look elsewhere due to the lack of cheapy audio options, but the high-performance user's needs are well met in the form of hardware monitoring and room for cooling. I guess the only exception there is that the AGP port is not a "Pro" model. This might affect you in the future if you want to get a Pro video card, as they will not be compatible with this socket. However, I don't know of ANY Pro-slot-only video cards as yet, and any manufacturer who makes one is cutting themselves out of a serious chunk of the market until more motherboards support them.

This tweaker-friendly impression is further reinforced by Abit's inclusion of SoftMenuIII on the board, which brings us to the next section..