Motherboards in 2001 Preview: Part 1

ABIT's Socket-A Solutions

ABIT has always been a favorite among hardware enthusiasts, so we know that many of you would love to see what ABIT will offer in the coming months.  To our surprise, we did not see a lot of DDR solutions from ABIT yet, although they probably will come in the near future.  On the other hand, they really showed their desire to produce boards suitable for high-end server applications. Traditionally, ABIT is not known for having the most stable solutions, making them an unlikely candidate to produce high-end server products. Fortunately, we’ve definitely noticed an upward trend in the quality of ABIT products, so hopefully this new market focus will just continue that evolution process.

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This is the KG-20, a micro-ATX board using the AMD 760 chipset.  It supports AMD’s Socket-A processors running at 200 or 266 MHz FSB with up to 2GB of DDR SDRAM.  Most AnandTech readers would probably be disappointed by this board because it is not a full ATX board, which means it’s expandability is inherently limited. While ABIT claims support for up to 2GB of DDR SDRAM, which is the limit of the 760 chipset, this would require 1GB DIMM’s since there are only 2 DIMM slots, which is not likely to happen any time soon. An ATX version is in the works, so you’ll have to wait a little bit longer if you want a standard ATX DDR solution from ABIT.  In fact, this board is the only DDR solution ABIT showed us, but they do plan to have other DDR motherboards using VIA’s DDR chipsets.

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Does this board look an awful lot like the KT7-RAID?  That’s because it is merely a new version of the board with one important change - the use of the VIA 8363A North Bridge, which enables support for 266MHz FSB AMD processors.  With the new North Bridge, the chipset becomes known as the KT133A, hence the addition of the  “A” to the model number.  The KT7A-RAID looks almost identical with the KT7-RAID, which features support for Socket-A processors, 6 PCI, 1 ISA, and 1 AGP slot, as well as the Highpoint HPT370 ATA 100 RAID controller.