Website: http://www.abit.com.tw
Price: $155
Like Joe Frazier's historic 15th round left hook, we are hitting you hard with a second heavyweight KT133 motherboard review (without the headache Ali must have felt). Along with ASUS' A7V, the KT7-RAID is the second flagship Thunderbird/Duron board to make its way into our labs and promises to offer some of the best performance we have seen yet.
Back in the days of Intel's 440BX, this would not be much of a contest - the stability differences between ASUS' 6-layer and ABIT's 4-layer PCB design were noticeable and affected many purchasing decisions. With the inception of the "4-layer reference design" for K7 motherboards, however, ASUS and ABIT are on quasi-equal footing for board design. Other manufacturers, such as MSI, Gigabyte, and FIC have all joined in the fray, making this a very good time to buy a new motherboard if you are dead-set on a new AMD processor.
Without further ado…
In this corner, weighing in at 205lbs, we have the recognized heavyweight champion (as far as our labs are concerned), ASUS' A7V. And in the opposite corner, weighing in at 215lbs, we have the "People's Champion" (because we know many of you already love this board), ABIT's KT7-RAID.
For those of you who have not picked up on the boxing match I have been referencing, here is a hint: "The Fight of the Century."