GamePC brengt ons een review waar veel mensen waarschijnlijk op zitten te wachten: de KA7 van Abit tegenover de K7V van Asus. Volgens Chris Connolly moet de Abit plank het vooral hebben van zijn goede layout en features (geen AMR, extra DIMM slot, SoftMenu III) terwijl de Asus K7V vooral uitblinkt op het gebied van performance en stabiliteit.
Abit went the extra mile with their 4 DIMM slots, making sure they would act stable when fully loaded with up to 2 GB of SDRAM. They've included a 6-chip data buffer set from Texas Instruments which sits directly to the left of the DIMM slots, which is said to ensure reliable operation at full SDRAM capacity. Since we didn't have 2 GB of SDRAM on-hand for testing, we can't say if it works or not, but Abit has included this 6-chip setup in the past with some BX boards, and it's worked perfectly. This 6-chip buffer also claims to help the board run ECC memory correctly.
Asus decided to include AC'97 compliant audio via a small Yamaha chip on the board. Nothing special here, it sounds decent, but most real gamers will quickly disable this and put in a Vortex/Live card to handle audio. You can disable the audio via a block of jumpers on the motherboard, so it's not an incredibly big deal.
Overall, most gamers will appreciate Abit's design much more, thanks to the extra PCI slot and extra DIMM slot, the lack of onboard audio, and the added area for CPU heatsinks. Abit's board design has a much cleaner look to it, everything seems to be layed out just perfectly. Hopefully we'll see Asus come out with a trimmed down, cleaned up version for their next KX-133 board offering.
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