My first two reviews of ABIT products were of video cards. It’s a little humorous considering that ABIT is best known for their great motherboards. Well the ABIT review of today is actually about one of their motherboards and it’s a feature rich product that holds up really well as long as you’re not using a video card with a Radeon R300 chip.

The ABIT KD7-G is an AMD board supports 200/266/333MHz FSB processors and sports the VIA KT400 and VT8235 chipsets. The AGP port supports modes of up to 8X for those cards that are just coming out now that are AGP 8X rated like ABIT’s own GF4 Ti4200 8X-OTES card. At 8X the peak bandwidth is 2.1 GB/s.

There are four memory slots on the board. For registered DDR 200/266, you can use all four sockets for a total of 3.5GB. If you have unregistered DDR 200/266, you can use three slots for a maximum of 3.0GB. If you want to take full advantage of the chipset, you can only put a maximum of 2 DDR 333/400 sticks for a maximum of 2GB of memory. It’s a little disappointing you can’t use all four slots if you have DDR333/400 ram. Two of the memory slots do sit quite close to the AGP port so it would be wise to fill those slots up first in case you want to add more later and don’t want to have to take your video card out to put them in.

Six PCI slots allow for a great deal of expansion and with the onboard devices that it has, you might not even have to use one at all. For the motherboard to have six PCI slots, the ABIT KD7-G gives you plenty of room to put in extra cards. The AGP port features a lock for you to keep those cards in securely.



USB 2.0’s starting to become the norm and the KD7-G gives you two rear ports and supplies one bracket for two more connections. If you have front connectors, the board has one more USB 2.0 connection pins for you to use. USB 2.0 is backwards compatible so you can be sure that all your old peripherals work along with any of the newer ones coming out.

A gigabit LAN port sits above the rear USB 2.0 connectors. That’s right, a gigabit LAN and not those puny 10/100 ports. The gigabit port provides 10/100/1000Mbps support giving you compatibility with most general networks while allowing you to take advantage of LANs with gigabit support. Gigabit hardware prices are dropping so it might not be too long before homes and business start outfitting their internal network with them.
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