More Board Stuff

A little tape

Since most of the heatsinks made for the AMD CPUs require screwdrivers combined with ludicrous amounts of force its only right that you have something protecting those fragile little traces surrounding the motherboard. With that in mind, Abit has installed a thin protective layer around one of the sides of the CPU socket. We’ve actually seen motherboards destroyed by a slipped screwdriver jamming into the PCB. Not a good scene people, and if we have a little more leeway I’m happy. Also note that the side that actually takes a screwdriver when putting on the heatsink has no trace lines whatsoever, on the primary layer.

The Strip

Floppy positioning

We’re not particularly pleased with the floppy connector spot. The traditional place for the floppy connector puts it in close proximity with the IDE1-2 connectors. On the KR7A, the floppy connector is close to the RAID connectors. Most of us have tower cases, meaning that the traditional floppy connector position enables us to slice that foot and a half long cable down to three inches if your floppy drive is in the middle of your case. You’re further out of luck if you have a full tower case that has the floppy at the top – this means that you need a floppy cable that runs almost the entire length of your case. Aside from this quirk, we don’t have any more gripes about the whereabouts of other motherboard components.

Toys and RAID

Abit packed this board full of goodies - some you may need, others you may have to decide whether you want. Amongst the new goodies is the Highpoint 372 ATA133 RAID controller. Many people do not use RAID, but the extra burst speed is nice if you manage to find some ATA133 drives out there. The speed difference probably will not be huge, or even noticeable, in daily use. Should you decide to take the RAID route, the onboard controller supports RAID 0, 1 and 0+1.

Another of the new toys is the presence of hordes of USB controllers. The KR7A comes with three controllers, giving you a total of six ports from which to put your mice, cameras and scanners.

For those of you on the cooling binge, the KR7A has the usual options we have come to expect out of Abit. The board has a fan and heatsink for the KT266A chipset, and support for three fans beside the header relegated for the CPU fan. Placement for the fan headers is rather logical – 1 near the AGP, the other near the power header, and one more right next to the CPU socket in case you want to do some funky CPU cooling.