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

Installation :

Installing a mother board is either something you can do or something you can't. If you have the basic knowledge needed to fit a mother board, then the KG7R will offer no unusual challenges.

Once the board has been screwed into place, step one is to set up your processor in the BIOS, a simple affair we'll cover on the next page. With that done, you then simply boot to your operating system and let the various driver installation routines go through their paces. The supplied installation CD contains all the required drivers, including the AMD miniport driver required for the North Bridge, in addition to some useful freeware and of course VIA's hardware monitor. The board installed and ran perfectly at the first time of asking.

One quirk of the KG7R is that the DIMMS need populating back to front. That is, you start with your first (or only) stick of memory in DIMM 4 and work towards DIMM 1. If you don't do this, you'll get a friendly reminder to do so while booting and no damage is done, I'm just a little confused as to why ABIT didn't just screen print the board the other way around showing DIMM 4 as DIMM 1 and vice versa and then amend the manual to suit. Of course doing this would have been technically incorrect, but it may save a little confusion for newer users. The only way to take advantage of all four DIMMS is by using registered DDR SDRAM which is very slightly more expensive than the more common unregistered variety. Doing this however allows you to pump the memory up to an awesome 4GB. If you use unregistered memory however, only the first two DIMMS (DIMM 4 and 3) can be used, or at least this is the theory. I say that because I got a real mixed bag of results even following this rule. I was not only able to run with four sticks of unregistered, I also failed to make it run with four sticks of registered when I mixed the brand. If you plan on filling all four DIMMS I strongly suggest you use identical sticks of registered SDRAM. You can try unregistered but be prepared for possible failure.

The AGP socket has no card retention mechanism fitted, which I though a little odd considering the target market, nor is it AGP Pro which to be honest is of very little concern at the moment anyway.

In summary, installing this board was a breeze with everything fitting where it should and doing what it was meant to. Drivers installed first time and worked without any intervention from me adding to the whole feeling of solid dependability. It's a promising start, now let's have a poke around the BIOS.

Page 4 - The BIOS