Advantages: Speed, stability, Soundstorm audio
Disadvantages: Nothing serious...

...The AMD Athlon XP range of CPUs is fairly mature these days, as are associated chipsets and motherboards. With the advent of the 64 bit Athlon 64, one could be forgiven for thinking the XP is consigned to the history books. Well, that’s not so – and not only because of the high entry price of 64 bit computing with its requirement for new motherboards, coolers and memory in addition to the CPU purchase. The excellent nForce2 chipset from Nvidia, better known for their graphics chipsets, has kept the Athlon XP bubbling along the performance curve very nicely, thank you. I’m going to take a look at the NF7-S (in v2.0 guise) – which is one of Abit’s best received implementations of this chipset. The NF7-S comes packed with a host of features: 2 IDE channels, SATA RAID support, Firewire, USB 2, the excellent Soundstorm audio, AGP 8x... Read review

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Advantages: Tweakability, stability, relyability
Disadvantages: price

...Some things are meant to go together. Horse & Carriage. Fish and Chips. Bread and Butter. Well, here's another on for the list - Abit's KT7-A Motherboard and AMD's socket A processor's. AMD's Socket A chips come in two varaieties - the Duron, and it's big brother, the Thunderbird. Abit's KT7-A motherboard has two options, the KT7-A, or the KT7-A RAID. Confused? Don't be! they'll all work with each other, so no problems there. The KT7-A is Abit's latest board using Via Technologies KT133A chipset. This chipset, and the boards using it, support the latest bells and whistles - 4xAGP, asyncronous memory timings, UDMA100, PC133 spec memory, etc. But the big difference between the A variants and the previous types is the A variants are ready for AMD's next generation of high speed chips. These chips will use a 133Mhz bus speed... Read review

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Advantages: Excellent for Overclocking
Disadvantages: Needed a bios update

...I recently purchased the ABIT AV8 3rd EYE Motherboard and an Athlon 64 - 3000 (Winchester core) Processor. I purchased the ABIT Motherboard due to the fact my last motherboard was ABIT and I was totally satisfied with it. When I got the AV8 set it all up with the new processor, I was let down because it did not work. As the processor was the latest version, the motherboard was unable to identify it, thus would not work. After purchasing a new bios chip for the board it fired up straight away. So i installed windows and away i went. I was totally amazed with the speed of the system and was so in awe of the new 3rd eye display. For those of you who don't know, the 3rd eye is an LCD display which is attached directly to the motherboard. It is run by a seperate processor on the motherboard, and can monitor upto 5 fans... Read review

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Advantages: cant fit them all here theres a big list in the review
Disadvantages: nope none

...bearing in mind that these boards are identical both in looks and specs but not in performance the abit wins for me as it was designed by the world champion gamer jonathan fatal1ty wendel more care has been put in this board than any other board i have ever owned even if you dont use your computer for games this board for its low price of 68 quid is well worth a go and the performance is there if needed you could even use it in a server as it will support 32 gb of memory and the latest 3.0ghz quad core extreme cpu no overclocking skills needed. Instead, a supercharged, factory overclocked system bus provides the hidden powers automaticly my only bad point is that when over clocking in the bios it is a litle more difficult than the asus but same overclocks are possible good points nice blood red colour this board does support... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, Stable, Reliable, Low Cost
Disadvantages: Fan not so reliable, not cutting edge technology

...ABIT boards have always been the choice for the PC enthusiast, their mix of performance, stability and features; have always provided the most to those people who want to get as much out of their computer as humanly possible. Now that the AMD’s Socket A range of processors have finally come to an end the NF7-S is arguably the best Socket A motherboard in the market. Version 2 of the board fixed a lot of the problems with the original board resulting in a feature packed stable board affordable for even those on the tightest budget. Board Features ~~~~~~~~~~~~ The board itself comes in a rather attractive red PCB; the connectors may not be a bright and exciting as the UV reactive connectors on the DFI LANParty. The positioning of the connectors however are pretty much spot on. There is plenty of clearance round the heatsink fan... Read review

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Advantages: Dual Channel Memory Controller, Sound-Storm with digital output, Serial ATA support, Great Overclocking
Disadvantages: South-bridge can sometimes get a little warm

...After looking around the market, and getting totally bamboozled with terms such as AN7 this A78N that and NF7 the other I decided to look for a motherboard that not only had a good feature list, but one that was within my price range. The first thing that you notice about the Abit NF7-S when you remove the motherboard is the fact that it has more features than you can shake a stick at. Serial ATA support for both single and raid drives, 5.1 Digital sound with AC3 encoding support thanks to the nvidia soundstorm and of course a nice northbridge cooling fan. When you open the box, you will notice a few items here that you will not really get with other motherboards - These are a Serial ATA cable, and a serielle adaptor. This adaptor allows you to use an IDE based hard-drive on the serial ATA channel and thus use a thinner cable... Read review

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Advantages: Easy of setup, 'Tweakability'
Disadvantages: Possibly unstable dependant on memory

...The Abit KA7-100 motherboard is one of the latest offerings from the Taiwan based company. Based around the Via KX133 Chipset, the board supports AMD's Athlon processot with it's slot A architechture. Unusually for a KX133 board, the KA7 has 4 DIMM slots allowing a maximum of 1Gb of system memory to be installed. All the other expected features are available - 5 PCI slots, a legacy ISA slot, and an AGP slot that, thanks to the KX133 chipset, supports 4xAGP. The board has 2 Ultra DMA 66 channels, but also sports 2 Ultra DMA 100 channels using an onboard Highpoint 370 controller chip. For the real performance seekers out there, the UDMA 100 channels can also be configured (using a second, preferably identical hard drive) as an IDE RAID array, which almost doubles the hard disk performance. Using Abit's SOFTMENU III, the board's bios... Read review

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Advantages: Performance, nice cooling system, double RAID
Disadvantages: Low quality chipset fan

...Abit's MAX series keeps going on with this excellent piece of technology. Although it's not the latest technology out there right now, it is fairly fast, and one of the best socket 754 motherboards you can get. MAX 3 comes equipped with tons of onboard features, such as the 3 Com Gigabit Ethernet, one on chip Via RAID controller (2xSATA), and another one onboard Silicon Image (4xSATA), allowing you to connect on your computer up to 10 (!!!) Hard Drives and CD/DVD drives. Its AGP guarantees to satisfy any gamer who inserts to it the most powerful AGPx4/x8 video card of his choice. Its high quality 5.1 sound card has to offer crystal clear surround sound, powered by Realtek. And for the hardcore sound fanatics, this board is equiped with Optical In and Optical Out jacks at the back. Can't get any better! Abit's OTES thermal solution... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, Quiet and Reliable
Disadvantages: None!!

...I bought the ABIT AV8 as an upgrade from a cheap-and-cheerful ASRock board. The ASRock was perfectly good, but I wouldn't go past the word 'Functional' to describe it. It did the job, and that's that. Hardly any ability to overclock, no soaring performance and 2 channel sound. The AV8 is a big step up from the ASRock, I can tell you now. I would recommend you have a look at the features it offers even if you weren't considering upgrading, because there are so many things on the list that I didn't know I needed but couldn't live without today. For example, how many times have you overclocked your PC just to find it refuses to boot at all? You then have to go through the process of removing the CMOS battery, removing all power, waiting for the BIOS to lose its settings and then connect back up and pray. With the AV8 there is no need... Read review

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Advantages: 133MHz FSB support, 1/2 AGP divider, stable, inexpensive
Disadvantages: Performance not up to overclocked BX solution

...I would like to share my experiences of the Abit VT6X4 slot 1 motherboard and its VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset. In the past I have always used boards with an Intel chipset in my own machines. As my PC is important for work and study as well as for play, stability has always been an influencing factor. With the VT6X4, Abit have implemented stability in the VIA chipset. The CPU I am using is a Slot 1 Intel Pentium 3 733MHz (133MHz FSB) chip, which I picked up second hand very inexpensively as an upgrade to my Celeron 366 (overclocked to 550). The P3 is a fast and stable chip - it runs pretty cool for a 733MHz CPU. The VIA chipset is not the fastest solution available; those who lust for those extra frames per second in Quake 3 should consider an overclocked Intel BX chipset solution - the BX chipset doesn't support a 1/2 AGP... Read review

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