Board Features

Four RAM banks

The Abit KR7A is one of the only boards out there with four RAM banks. Designing a board that can handle four populated DIMM slots is no small feat. Take a look at most of the competition and you’ll see that most draw the line at three DIMM slots. Sadly the effort in doing this is largely lost on the majority of users, especially those who use the KR7A for what it was built to do – overclock like a madman. More DIMMs increases the likelihood of overclocking failure, not to mention the cost of buying four high-end DIMMs. While you could run the system bus asynchronous of the memory bus, performance results are less than stellar. When possible with these systems, you always want the memory running in time with the FSB.

Six PCI slots

It’s good to note that Abit knows who their primary consumer is – not an OEM. These boards are meant for one group of people only – the enthusiasts. This is readily apparent with the Spartan features in terms of hardware. Gone is the onboard sound, no on board networking, and no onboard video – but the key missing components are the give away – the AMR and CNR slots. Working in the hardware scene as long as we have – we’d be hard pressed to say that we’ve actually ever seen the cards that go into those slots. We’d sure as hell be surprised to find a gamer or overclocker caught dead with either of those two cards.

As this board is meant for overclocking, we’re even more surprised that Abit takes the time out to add six PCI slots to this motherboard. Many overclocking problems arise from running the PCI bus out of spec. Simply adding a SCSI card ruins most attempts at overclocking, the reduction in stability is rather dramatic. Adaptec SCSI cards have been known to get antsy when running one or two MHz above the standard 33MHz. Abit might consider dropping a few of these engineering marvels and opt to get into the market a bit earlier. Not that we’re complaining about the features, but I’d rather have the board earlier than have a sixth PCI slot that will most likely never see any use. I’d wager good money that 90% of computer users never get past using three of the slots.