Introduction

When we initially reviewed the Abit AT7 Motherboard a few months ago, we were very impressed with its speed, features and overclockability. However, two things stopped it from being a motherboard for everyone. Firstly, its lack of legacy ports will obviously be a problem for users still using legacy devices, and secondly, the board is far from cheap. Realizing this, Abit set out to create a KT333-based motherboard for the mainstream market; keeping the legacy ports and a few of the AT7's features but losing the ultra-high price.

The end result was the KX7-333R. It may be based on the same chipset as the AT7, but it really is quite different in many ways. For example, rather than including firewire, 6-channel audio and 4-channel RAID, this time Abit has kept the legacy ports, scrapped the onboard audio and only included 2-channel RAID. The lack of integrated features has also allowed Abit to include more enthusiast features on the KX7 such as 6 PCI slots, compared to the 3 slots seen on the AT7. The AT7 and MAX was a totally new concept and direction for Abit, while the KX7-333R is a traditional Abit motherboard in every way.

The question on many of your minds will probably be: "Were we as impressed with the KX7-333R as we were with the AT7?" Well, I guess you'll have to read on to find out!