 |
|
Database error occurred while retrieving the affiliates list |
|
|
 |
|
ABIT KT7-RAID, One Year Later
Page 1 - When Quality Assurance is not so quality
This article is essentially a rant, but it should provide you with some valuable information for
the next time you go to purchase a motherboard. However, this article will not be a one sided ABIT
sucks article. I will explain why. So, if you're ready to listen, I'm ready to tell you a story.
The reason this article won't be a complete slam on ABIT is because of one reason. All the
motherboards in this house right now, all 5 of them are ABIT motherboards (except for the 286
motherboard I use for a wall decoration). All of the ABIT motherboards work, except one, the
KT7-RAID.
I bought an ABIT KT7-RAID and a AMD Athlon 800 MHz chip about a year ago, when they first came
out. What is key about this is that I purchased this motherboard. This means
this is what the consumer actually gets, it was not one of those cherry picked motherboards the
manufacturers send tech sites to review so they will get good ratings. In fact, most of the stuff
I review I purchase now days.
I picked up a whole new set of system componenets to build around this new computer. This computer
is pretty well equipped right now, and is actually the computer I am writing this article on. In
the mail I have a KG7-RAID, Athlon XP 1800+, and 1GB of Corsair DDR RAM, which will replace this
piece of crap motherboard as soon as I can get my hands on them. I'll talk more about this ABIT
purchase later.
When I first assembled my computer, I was amazed with it's speed. The RAID, the 800 MHz Athlon,
the whole thing was just fast. I had my 800 MHz Tbird overclocked to 900 MHz and all was good,
but then things started to change.
About 2 months into owning it, I started to notice crashes in Win2k that were for the most part,
just sporadic, nothing too frequent. These crashes were usually Memory dumps and NT Kernel errors.
About the fourth month, I clocked my 800 MHz Tbird back down too 800 because as these errors
became more frequent, the only thing I could think that would cause the problem was my
overclocking, which was fine up until that time. I decreased the clock speed, it helped for a
couple weeks it seemed, but then the problems resumed. Ok, it is time for a format, I thought.
I format, doesn't work. I tried different operating systems, no soup. Ok, I think you get the
point. I ordered a new chip, a 1 GHz Tbird.
Did the new processor solve the problem? No, not really, it did the same thing my previous chip
did, it started off ok, and then went down hill, but this time much more quickly. I must also
note that I acquired many new USB devices through this time. I started to notice a general trend
of USB failures occurring. The more USB devices I had, the more they didn't work. I lost mpg,
avi, ram, and pretty much all types of video play back.
Next up: random reboots. This has to be my favorite problem with motherboard. There is nothing
quite like coding for an hour and then as you start to move your mouse up the save icon, you see
your BIOS because your computer just rebooted. This is the most recent error to turn up, it
started happening about 3 months ago and is just one of those things that makes an already
stressful life worse.
|
Join Xtreme Tek's Mailing List
|
|
Home
Main Page