Board Layout

Board Layout

The top of the KT7 is dotted with capacitors -- seven 2200uF capacitors on three sides of the Socket A interface, and more around the DIMM sockets and AGP slot. As a result, installing some of the larger heatsinks available on the market may be a bit of a hassle. We didn't run into any problems installing our Golden Orb heatsink for testing.

For ATA/100 RAID functionality, HighPoint's HPT370 controller is used. With support for up to four drives on two channels, the KT7 is capable of running up to eight hard drives. We'll talk about the HPT370 in more depth on the next page.

The HighPoint controller

ATA/100 on the right, ATA/66 on the left

Unfortunately, the KT7 lacks a power LED. While this isn't a major feature, it's comforting to see the LED light up on other motherboards when the power is connected. Another missing feature is the diagnostic LED display we've seen on many MSI motherboards. Basically, with the exception of the fan on the chipset, the KT7 is a no-frills, simple design.

More details

One thing's for sure, the KT7 is loaded with fan headers! Two are located next to the DIMM sockets at the top of the motherboard; a third header lies next to the AGP slot, and the fourth lies just below the CMOS battery. With this many fan headers, you shouldn't have any problems finding a connection for a system fan or card cooler (in comparison, the ASUS A7V also has four fan headers).

While we're being nitpicky, we'd also like to point out the thermistor for recording CPU core temperature in the center of the Socket A interface (a feature not present on our A7V). We received three KT7-RAID samples for this review (two mass production and one prerelease). On the two mass-production boards, we had to slightly bend the thermistor to install the CPU properly. We wouldn't be surprised if this were the case for the entire initial batch of motherboards ABIT manufactured.

Thermistor

Packaging

The KT7 is the one of the first ABIT motherboards we've seen that includes both the 40-pin and 80-conductor IDE cables for the ATA/66 and CD-ROM drive (the BX133 RAID and KA7-100 being the other motherboards with both cables). The packaging is rounded out with ABIT's excellent KT7/KT7-RAID manual, driver CD, and another first -- a 2-port USB bracket for out-of-the-box support for up to four USB devices.