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

The BIOS:

If you didn't know any better you'd be forgiven for thinking that Abit invented the computer BIOS when in actual fact the merely reinvented it. Abit have an uncanny ability to take a chipset and offer features in the BIOS that simply nobody else has. Softmenu has been around on Abit boards for what seems like an eternity, and for those who've grown familiar with it there's simply no substitute anywhere in the market.
SoftmenuIII continues Abit's mastery of the BIOS, as do the bewildering array of tweaks and timing modifications that can be performed. Many of the more exotic settings are directly related to chipset and memory timings and unless you're familiar with their effects these should be left set to Auto. The good news is that Abit are planning on launching a site dedicated entirely to understanding and implementing many of these performance options, and as soon as it's up and running we'll let you all know through our news page.

Let's cast an eye over the basic offerings :

Softmenu III :

Using SoftMenuIII, all CPU parameters can be set up with minimal fuss. In keeping with Abit's traditions, the KG7 is a board that lives up to its claims of a jumperless design with only a single solitary jumper on the board itself, that being to clear CMOS memory. CPU speed can be set to one of the presets which range from 500(100) <processor speed(FSB)> to 1400(133). Alternatively you can set the speed to "user defined" which allows manual setting of both the multiplier (from 5x to 13x) and FSB (from 100 to 200MHz) in 1MHz increments. You can also manually select the CPU : SDRAM : PCI ratio from options of 3:3:1 or 4:4:1. It would have been nice to see a 5:5:1 setting too but I'm splitting hairs.

Also adjustable from here are Vcore voltage up to the usual 1.85V and I/O voltage at either 3.50 or 3.60 Volts. A nice touch is that you can tweak memory voltage up to 3.0V.

Another feature you may not be used to can be found in amongst the "Advanced Chipset" menu. In addition to the usual settings like AGP aperture size and general memory settings is an option labeled" Chipset Driving Control ". Hitting enter takes you to a whole slew of timing settings that fortunately can be set to "Auto", but if you suddenly get the urge to experiment you can set a range of slew rates, driver strengths and data strobes.

The system health screen offers the features we have come to accept these days such as CPU temperature, system temperature and CPU and chassis fan speeds. In addition is the option to have the system shut down if it fails to detect rotation from the CPU fan.

RAID Options :

Pressing Ctrl and H while booting gives access to the RAID setup menu. From here you can create, delete and rebuild your arrays.

Selecting the "Create" option then takes you to a further sub menu where you select the type of array you wish to create. Options are :

STRIPING (RAID 0) - This is a performance option that allows data to be read and written to multiple drives in parallel. Creating a RAID 0 array involves the wiping of your disk drives and at least 2 disk drives are required.

MIRROR (RAID 1) - This option offers data security by writing the SAME data to multiple hard disks in parallel thus creating a real time backup of your data. RAID 1 can be created without wiping your disk drives. At least 2 disk drives are required.

STRIPING + MIRROR (RAID 0+1) - As the name suggests, this offers the benefits of both options by performing striping and mirroring at the same time, though this obviously requires 4 disk drives. Creating this type of array involves wiping your hard disks.

Page 5- Performance