Motherboard: ABIT KG7-RAID :: Installation

When you are installing or maintaining a motherboard inside a case some problems you cannot see are right in front of your eyes. Like location of slots, IDE and Floppy Cables, and motherboard power connectors. It is important to maintain airflow inside the case. IDE and floppy cables will do anything in their power to prevent your airflow! The outlook of this board is pretty good but not without some flaws. The floppy and RAID IDE connectors location is a little bit far but the orientation is ok when you consider how they plug them into the drives(no bending of the cables). The power switch and led headers have been moved from their classical position are now a little bit far for my liking.

Without taking out the AGP card it is not possible to install the fourth memory module. Most motherboards that have 4 DDR Memory Slots have this problem.

It's not easy to design a board with RAID, all of these features, 4 Memory slots, and within a reasonable size. Size does matter because it affects the price dramatically.

The thing I most like on quality motherboards these days is the film they placed around the CPU Socket. When you try to install the heatsink and fan its possible to damage the board. The metal clip sometimes hits the board hard no matter how careful you are. By the way, when you are installing the fan and the heatsink the placement of capacitors on the board is important. For overclocking we sometimes use huge heatsink and fans. I think for these boards the capacitors are a little bit close to the socket.

The most famous thing about ABIT is their Soft Menu Setup. You can change everything about voltage, clock, and frequency settings. You can adjust the frequency up to 200 MHz and clock above 13X. We are not responsible if you don't know what you are doing when overclocking. But if you want to overclock and know what you are doing it is easy. For example we overclocked the CPU 1.4 GHz to 1575 MHz changing the frequency from 133 to 150 MHz.

Of course for stability I pumped a little bit more voltage to the CPU by changing the Vcore Voltage. I think to change the DDR Voltage a little bit helps too. You can change your CPU Voltage up to 1.85 V by 0.025V steps, and your memory Voltage to 3 V. But be careful. If you increase your speed step by step, to a certain extent you enjoy speeding. But if you press on the gas pedal without knowing what you are doing, you die. In this case you can shorten your memory modules life or burn your CPU. Sure, there are clock settings in the BIOS if you know how to tweak your CPU by magic pen.

STABILITY AND COMPATIBILTY

From now on for motherboards, I'd like to add one more section to our standard format and tell you how we do our stability tests. For a motherboard stability is more important than speed. If you see system crashes frequently and it's killing your work or entertainment, performance is second.

TORTURE TESTS

We use three programs for testing the stability of the board. First I add 4 more unnecessary add-on cards for the test. And of course AGP Video Card.

• Sound Blaster Live Player Sound Card
• Intel 10/100 82559 WOL Ethernet Card
• Zoom 2920 Onboard DSP and Controller Modem
• Lifeview TV Tuner Card
• Cardex GeForce 3 Golden Sample Video Card

And for the IDE part I add:

• Pioneer 16x DVD Player
• Plextor 16x10x40 CD-Rewriter
• IBM Deskstar IC35040AVER07 (For Raid Motherboards I'll add one more harddrive and do striping)

First I upgraded the BIOS and installed XP Professional Edition from scratch. I installed the latest versions of drivers for the cards and connected it to the network. Then turned on the TV Tuner, copied some files from the network and tried to dial from the modem at the same time. Once this works without problems I start the burn-in tests. The First test is Check-It Pro. It is the Industry standard burn-in test for most of the manufacturers. I adjust the software for continuous testing for motherboard-CPU-memory subsystem. I set it for 130 times, which takes about 24 hours.

For Windows memory and CPU Subsystem burn-in tests I use prime95's Torture test. Because it hits the CPU so hard using calculations sometimes we see 4-5 C degrees of CPU temperature increase. Actually it tries to find Mersenne prime numbers by heavy calculations. Overclocking your CPU or testing your PC for stability prime95's Torture test is the best way to go. I started the test and let it run for 24 hours. Then I setup Sysmark 2001 and Patch 3 for continous testing for 24 hours. If the motherboard is still alive, then it is stable! For myself I overclocked the CPU by 10% and applied another Prime95 for a night to see its overclocking stability. And believe me this board passed all of these tests.