Abit has an enviable reputation, especially amongst the over-clocking community, and the KT7A RAID board has all the features to support this status. This Socket A motherboard can use the Athlon and Duron processors, with up to 1.5GB of memory. Abit has attempted to future-proof this board by using a 3-phase power system; basically a set of six transistors that enable a regulated supply to the CPU of up to 46 Amps. A little over-kill, we feel, but over-engineering never hurt anyone.

In common with other boards tested here, this one incorporates the VIA KT133 chipset that supports 133MHz on the system and memory buses. But the main feature that sets this board apart is the inclusion of the Highpoint HTP370 Chipset. This adds an extra two IDE channels to the motherboard, each supporting the UltraDMA/ATA-100 spec. Not only does this give you a choice of eight IDE devices, but it also enables a RAID-style disk array to be established.

This feature will 'stripe' two drives for simultaneous read and write access over a compound volume, giving a considerable performance increase. Alternatively, the drives can be 'mirrored' for increased data security (a copy of all data is written to the second drive, and if one drive fails the second carries on running without any data loss).

The board's BIOS includes a soft-menu option to give you control over clock factors and bus speeds, and it's possible to incrementally increase the FSB (200MHz and 266MHz speeds are supported) by steps and push the clock speed to higher levels.

This is a well-featured board - it even has a legacy 16-bit ISA slot - and the performance increase offered by the disk striping feature is quite considerable. Definitely a front-runner in the upgrade stakes.

For the full specification of this board, see the Features table.