ABIT KV7 (KT600) Mainboard

The primary and secondary IDE connectors are along the lower right side of the board, set at a 90 degree angle.  There is an up and a down side to this.  The up side is that with the connectors on the edge in this fashion it is easier to hide or obscure ribbon cable.  The down side is that if you use the KV7 in a larger tower case, you may need some extended IDE cables because otherwise you may not be able to reach IDE 2.

Moving to I/O connector panel we find lots of goodies.  The first thing that caught my eye were the four USB 2.0 ports.  These four ports are in addition to the two additional connectors on the board itself that provide for an additional four ports.  On board NIC courtesy of the VT6103 chip is here.  This is a standard 10/100 mbps connection.  No gigabit here, not that many of us could actually use gigabit except for maybe a good LAN party.

The 5.1 Dolby style audio jacks on the back looked odd to me for a second until I noticed that the SPDIF port didn't have the usual plug.  On closer inspection we found that this port is covered by two small doors.  Thumbs up for ABIT knowing that small plugs get lost at times.

  

BIOS

On to the heart of any good mainboard, the BIOS.  The ABIT KV7 has the now famous ABIT Soft Menu III.  The Soft Menu III gives you lots of access and adjustments that is arguably the best around.

Beginning in the Soft Menu setup screen we find that in addition to selecting your CPU speed you have the option to manually set the front side bus from 100 to 250MHz and all points in between.  As your FSB increases so does the frequency of your AGP and PCI.  This is addressed by the option to select a divider ratio of 3:2:1 up to 6:2:1.

     

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