ABIT KV7 (KT600) Mainboard

Manufacturer: ABIT
Supplied by: ABIT
Street Price: $80

By Dean Barker (11/11/2003)

Introduction

The emergence of the VIA KT600 chipset was an attempt to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by NVidia and their nForce2.  The KT600 offers improvement over its predecessors in the way of official support of chips using a 400MHz front side bus, VIA’s VT1616 codec for improved audio performance, increased V-Link to 1066MHz (up from 533HMz) and native SATA ports thanks to the VIA VT8238 South Bridge.  So as you can see there are several improvements with the latest generation VIA board.  The central question is 'sure, all the extra stuff is nice but will the KT600 be able to compete and beat out the nForce2?' 

ABIT has put out their version of the KT600 in the form of the KV7 board.  ABIT, long known for high quality and performance products seems to be aiming the KV7 at a more cost sensitive audience.  With many of the improvements and additional native support for items found on the KT600, the KV7 very well may make quite a showing.  Let’s take a look at the board and see what we have.

Specifications

• Processor: Supports Athlon/Athlon XP/Barton

• FSB support: 200/266/333/400MHz

• Northbridge: VIA KT600

• Southbridge: VIA VT8237

• Memory: Three DIMM slots, official support for DDR400.

• Max memory support of two DIMM DDR 333/400 or three DIMM DDR 266.

• On board LAN: VIA VT6103 10/100 MB Ethernet controller

• On board Audio: VIA VT1616 Six Channel AC97 audio CODEC

• SPDIF output connector

• IDE: Duel IDE channels for ATA133

• Serial ATA: Two ports SATA150 VIA VT8237 controller (RAID

• Internal I/O: One floppy connector, eight USB 2.0 ports (four external ports, two internal connections allowing for four additional ports), two UDMA 133 connectors, two SATA150 connectors, CD in, Aux in, no Firewire connectors.

• AGP: One AGP 8X slot

• PCI: Five PCI slots

• ATX Form Factor

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