Abit KG7 RAID motherboard- $47. plus s&h - It's baaack at the Geeks!

[DealyDo]

I was going to wait until compgeeks got it back, but perhaps I'll order from directron. Anyone order from them before?

Bought mt Lian-Li case from them , they're ok. I live here in Houston. They're in a small warehouse strip center building. Asian guys running the place. Low overhead kind of deal. I consider them trustworthy.

 

[Devistater]

Originally posted by: moonfish
Buying outdated or even worse discontinued chipsets is no picnic. The chipset had a very short lifespan and bios updates quit coming. I guess it's all at the discretion of abit though, maybe they will take care of you. But when you pop your new video card in and it doesn't work- you'll curse.

Are you referring to how the new radeon 9700 cards don't work at 8X in a 8X motherboard? Not exactly a concern here, this mobo doesn't support 8x

 

[Salvador]

Back in stock at Justdeals (as much as I hate Justdeals). For the h*ll of it, I decided to check the link and they just showed 100 in stock (99 now after I just placed an order). I used a $5 off coupon and it came to $56.xx shipped via UPS Ground. Shipping was $11.90 for me -- sort of excessive, but it's reasonable if you use the $5 off coupon.

Please don't ask me where to find the $5 off coupon. A simple search for "justdeals" on F@tw@llet's forums will turn up the code.

Sal

 

[lalani2]

The specs on the Abit KG7-RAID say that this board supports up to PC2100 RAM. Anyone know if the memory bus can be overclocked? I want to run PC2700 RAM at full speed, is it possible?

 

[Salvador]

Yes.. Justdeals lists this mobo as being XP compatible, so are they selling these KG7's with the newest BIOS?

Also.. I just talked with someone that knows a bit more about computer parts than I do and he said that this board would be slower (not overclocked) than my ECS K75SA that I would replace. Does anyone know for sure if this is true?

Thanks again.

Sal

 

[Johnbear007]

Originally posted by: Chang10is
Holy cow!!! Man, I really really want to jump on this deal, but I don't really need to upgrade system right now. Is Abit still making these, or are they being discontinued?

Wei2Cool, I think this should be a bit better than the ECS mobo. ECS's reliability isn't the greatest from what I've heard.

Ive been using a K7S5a for over a year, built 4 other systems for friends and family with them. They have been hands down the easiest/most stable board ive setup/used to date

 

[Salvador]

Ok.. If you guys decide to order through Justdeals, be very sure that you want this board. I had second thoughts and decided against it and I'm having a h*ll of a time contacting Justdeals right now. I tried email and they said that they would get back to me within 4 business days (Doh!). I tried their toll phone number and got an answering machine with a woman that doesn't speak very good Engrish. I certainly hope that I get a call before they ship.

I'm cancelling because I realized that this board just doesn't fit into my grand scheme of things, even though I do think it's a great deal. I just wanted to clear that up so nobody asked me if I was cancelling because I thought the board sucked or something.

Anyway.. Be sure you want it before you place your order with Justdeals.

Sal

 

[Salvador]

Geez.. I've never seen interest die so quick with a deal.

BTW.. Justdeals now shows 202 in stock and I still can't get a hold of someone at Justdeals to cancel my order.

Sal

 

[Devistater]

My interest hasn't died, I'm still thinking about ordering. I want to order from directron though, I think I ordered from them a while back.

 

[lalani2]

Mine either. I ordered one today. Can't wait to hook up a couple of drives into the onboard RAID.

By the way, does this have a real hardware raid controller? I want to be able to run my system/boot partition from the raid array.

 

[RobSay]

Just got mine today from directron. It was XP ready without having to flash the bios.

 

[djkym]

anyone having latency issues (pci or ide) w/ the board? I ran sandra for tweak wiz and it told me that my pci latency on my linksys nic's were too high. when i tried using breeze patch, it says i wasn't supposed to use it for hybrid sets like the kg7. also, i think my hd's are also running slower than they should (on hd tach, i'm getting 12.6 for random access time and 55ms for read burst speed--i get better numbers when i run it off the raid ide than the via one, but for some reason, my system slows down incredibly when it has to read from the hard drive...also there are times where my sequential speeds just run at snail pace @ close to 0) on one of those maxtor 40 gig hd's that they had at OD on this board.

i was about to run some wpcredit, but those settings just confused me...

any help would be greatly appreciated

my sis:
kg7 raid w/ 9M bios, all the latest drivers
sb live
linksys nic x 2
aopen gf 3 ti 200 128 mb ram
maxtor 40 gig hd (running on its own ide chan)
superdisk ide and buslink cd burner running together
crucial 256
win xp w/ sp1

 

[dxpaap]

djkym, got a newbie question on measuring system performance,

you mentioned: "sandra for tweak wiz " and "breeze patch" , are those freeware that I could download somewhere ?

Do you know of any other good (free) system utilities for tuning up performance (Win2K).

thanks

 

[djkym]

it's http://www.sisoftware.demon.co.uk/sandra/ for the sandra software..it does alot of diff perf measurements
another bencher: http://www.etestinglabs.com/benchmarks/winbench/winbench.asp
the breeze patch..its: http://www.networking.tzo.com/net/software/
and hd tach to measure hd speed is at http://www.tcdlabs.com/

 

[WT]

djkym, what version of the Via 4 in 1's are you using ? I used the ones that came on the CD, but they obviously aren't the newest. Check here for the RAID FAQ portion of the website:

Paul's Unofficial KG7 FAQ - RAID problems

 

[Devistater]

Originally posted by: RobSay
Just got mine today from directron. It was XP ready without having to flash the bios.

Great! Because I have that newegg 1600XP ready to go into it

Originally posted by: lalani2
Mine either. I ordered one today. Can't wait to hook up a couple of drives into the onboard RAID.

By the way, does this have a real hardware raid controller? I want to be able to run my system/boot partition from the raid array.

Its got the chip onboard if that's what you mean. The highpoint whatever raid chip. And YES you can boot from it. I've booted from mine before (I have a KT7A RAID, which is nearly identical). Keep in mind that if you run a stripe RAID, be CAREFUL when updating bios, it can screw your RAID array. Make sure you backup the stuff before you update BIOS if you use a stripe array. Or just update BIOS when you get the board and don't update it again unless you backup The FAQ link that the guy above posted is a great reference for all sorts of info on the KG7 (and some other abit mobos). In fact, he's kinda the uber abit FAQ guy, even the Abit guys post his FAQ questions and refer people back to his FAQ.

 

[Devistater]

Well I broke down and ordered it finally

 

[dxpaap]

djkym, thanks for the links

 

[Salvador]

It's down to $47.77 at Justdeals. They still have a buttload left too.

BTW.. I attacked Justdeals from all ends. Fax, phone (sales and support), email, etc.. I finally checked my account and someone got the message that I wanted to cancel my order. An email would've been nice to let me know though.

Sal

 

[WT]

I recently had problems with stuttering sounds (mp3, games) with this board in Windows 2000 and found that something had turned off UDMA mode on the hard drive, resetting it back to PIO mode. Reloading the Via 4 in 1's didn't fix the problem, but by deleting both the Primary IDE and Secondary IDE channels and rebooting, W2K redetected them properly and they are now running UDMA mode and the sound stuttering has gone away. I'm not sure if a Windowsupdate caused the problem, since I just loaded SP3 from Microsoft on my W2K machine, but thought I would post here to help anyone else out that ran into this problem recently.