3DVelocity would like to thank Abit and especially Scott Thirwell for their help and courtesy in providing this motherboard for review.

A Closer Look :

The KG7R looks pretty much like any other well designed socket A motherboard on the market other than the fact that Abit managed to include four memory DIMMS.

4 DIMMS

The intricacies involved in creating a quality board means looks count for very little in performance terms. Timing variations made by lengthening a trace here or shortening a trace there can make a world of difference to overall board efficiency, as can component placement and quality, so we can't really make any judgements of a board based on looks alone. It is a large board compared to some, but not unusually so. A lot of time and trouble has been taken to position things like the ATX power connector and the IDE connectors where they are best suited and even the additional IDE RAID connectors are staggered so as not to block the use of full length add-in PCI cards. As you can see below, the ATX power connector is positioned right on the board's edge, and though I don't consider this feature useful if it compromises other parts of the board's design, it's certainly a feature a great many people will appreciate. Alongside the KG7 below is DFI's AK76-SN which uses an identical chipset configuration and also sports a 3 phase power arrangement.

Abit KG7R (left) alongside DFI's AK76-SN

With 6 PCI slots plus the regular AGP4x slot, expansion is well catered for, and it was nice to see Abit had not fallen into the trap of strapping on any rarely used features like AMR/CNR slots and onboard Audio. This is an enthusiasts board through and through, but as we'll see later it also offers enough automation to allow even the novice to join the ranks of the high performance hardware owners.

Clearance around the socket isn't extraordinarily good in all honesty, and while most of the HSF combos I tried here went on just fine, you may need to give a little thought before you dash out and buy anything unusually bulky. Part of the reason that space is so tight is the size and placement of those monster capacitors dotted about. If this doesn't reassure you that your power requirements are in good hands, then chances are nothing will.

Socket Clearance

Combine this with Abit's traditionally robust three phase power schematic and you have not only a thoroughly impressive set of voltage handling features, but you also have a lot of construction needs doing around the socket itself hence the difficulties with keeping a good component free zone around its perimeter. Don't get me wrong, the no component zone has been followed and clearance is as good as you'll find on many a board, it's just not exceptional. The socket is right on the board's edge which gives a little extra help with bulkier HSF's too, and to be fair you don't need to use a Copper house brick to get good cooling these days as we discovered with Swiftech's impressive line.

3 Phase Power

Perhaps the most obvious potential problem comes from the placement of the FDD connector right down on the edge of the board. Those of you with large Mid tower cases or anything bigger may find you need an extra long floppy cable to reach it, but of course Abit are aware of this potential problem and supply said extra long floppy cable in the box.........come on guys, give me something to moan about!!

Floppy connector placement

Fan header count falls in line with most boards at three plus one for the active cooling on the North Bridge so no complaints on that score. All three headers other than the chipset fan header are speed monitored.

Also in the box along with the extra length floppy cable are two rather than the more common single 80 conductor ATA66/100 IDE cable, installation CD, floppy disk containing the HighPoint HPT370 drivers and the rather nice addition of an additional 2 back plane USB ports ready to be plugged in bringing the count to four. The manual is Abit's usual, well detailed affair covering all the main points in sufficient detail to get up and running quickly and easily.

Highpoint's HPT370A RAID chip is probably familiar to most of you offering RAID 0 (Stripping) which boosts system performance by performing multiple reads and writes to your array concurrently, RAID 1 (Mirroring) which increases data security by writing the same data to multiple drives in the array concurrently, or RAID 0+1 which as the name suggests is a combination of the two. The HPT3770A supports full ATA100 standards and is plug and play compliant. It runs off dual independent ATA channels allowing concurrent PIO and bus master access.

Page 3 - Installation