Board Layout

Board Layout

The KT7 and KT7A both share the same layout, in fact, if the labeling were missing from both boards, you'd be hard-pressed to see the difference between them. ABIT still uses active cooling on the North Bridge of the KT133A chipset and ABIT still boasts its 3-phase power solution for the KT7A.

The KT7A-RAID

Shiny capacitors

To minimize the trace distances between the 8363A North Bridge and the CPU socket/AGP slot, ABIT tilts the chip 45 degrees. This should result in cleaner signals between these components.

The KT7A allows plenty of room for large heatsink/fan cooling systems for your CPU, and a wealth of fan headers to choose from. Glancing over the board it's very apparent that it was designed for hardcore hardware enthusiasts: six PCI slots with one ISA slot for legacy devices are available, four IDE connectors for up to eight devices total are present, four fan headers for powering cooling devices, the list goes on and on.

Cooling fan on the North Bridge

A metal socket lever, finally!

The only thing missing from the KT7A is a power LED and onboard diagnostic LEDs. Wouldn't it be cool if ABIT offered an optional external control box similar to ASUS's iPanel or the Creative Live!Drive IR!?

Other notables

HighPoint's HPT370 IDE controller is used for ATA/100 RAID support. With support for RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1, the HighPoint controller is used on a wide variety of motherboards from ABIT and other motherboard manufacturers. To differentiate the ATA/100 RAID connectors from the ATA/100 connectors supported by the chipset, ABIT uses fluorescent orange connectors. To learn more about RAID and its performance, check out our original KT7-RAID review.

KT7A in action

The VIA 686B South Bridge

The KT7A is larger than most KT133 motherboards. This is something you might want to keep in mind if you have a small case.