Abit KX7-333/KX7-333R DDR Athlon Motherboard
Last updated: 10/3/2002

INTRODUCTION. This review of the Abit KX7-333 and KX7-333R motherboards are the first Abit motherboards we have formally reviewed since the BH6 Pentium motherboard five years ago.  The technology has changed significantly since then.  A large part of the change has been the advent and evolution of the AMD Athlon processor and supporting motherboards.

The first Athlon board we used was the Micro Star MSI-6167.  It was reviewed almost three years ago with a 650 MHz Slot A Athlon.  The Abit KT7-RAID followed, and was the first Socket A and ATA/100 motherboards we used and the last one to use single data rate SDRAM memory.  The Athlon was running at 1.1 GHz.  The EpoX EP-8KHA+ with a 1.4 GHz Athlon introduced us to Double Data Rate (DDR) memory and the end of ISA expansion board slots.  Today, the KX7-333 brings an incremental increase in the technology with the VIA KT333 chipset and DDR2700 (333 MHz) memory.  For this review we again stepped-up the CPU horsepower to a 1.6 GHz AMD Athlon XP 1900+ processor.  Part of the review will compare benchmarks for this motherboard, memory, and CPU combination with all of the abovementioned Athlon motherboards and try to describe and put into perspective what one can expect by upgrading to this motherboard.

Like all of our motherboard reviews, this one is written mainly from the perspective of the small business users that we serve.  This perspective may also provide useful information for other potential users of this motherboard that is not available elsewhere.  For the sake of brevity we will refer to both motherboards as the KX7-333 and point-out any differences as we proceed.

This review also includes benchmarks of the Western Digital WD800 Special Edition ATA/100 hard disk drive with 8 MBytes of disk cache' in normal and RAID configurations.  The box the drive comes in says, "LIGHTNING FAST."  Is it?

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