Its has been a very long time since I last laid eyes on an Abit product. In fact, six months has passed since I last reviewed one of their products. Early this year Abit seemed to be gaining a lot of momentum in both the motherboard and graphics card market. Today, Abit seem to have lost a lot of their market awareness, they seem to have forgotten what made their MAX motherboards so well known or their OTES graphics cards. As I said six months has passed and I have heard very little from Abit, sure there has been new product releases but where are the samples? Sadly, I have seen very few Abit reviews over the past six months and this is purely because there are no samples. Anyway, this review is not an analysis of the bad direction in which Abits marketing maybe heading, instead I am going to look at one of their newest products.

Fortunately, I was able to obtain a sample of Abits new VIA KT600 motherboard, although the sample was provided by another source. The last Abit product which did pass through the labs was the cost effective BH7 boasting superior overclocking abilities. The BH7 was a basic looking motherboard designed purely to offer the user the highest level of overclocking performance, stability and value.

Today, I will be test driving the K7V and as mentioned previously this motherboard is based on the new VIA KT600 chipset. I recently posted a KT600 roundup based on five KT600 motherboards from the likes of Gigabyte, ASUS, EPoX, Soltek and MSI. All boards performed very competitively however, the MSI solution offered slightly better performance than the rest. Already the K7V looks to have inherited all that was good about the BH7, for example; it is the cheapest KT600 board I have looked at so far with a retail value of $80 US.

Much like the BH7 the K7V is a very basic looking motherboard built around a very small PCB. Due to the boards chipset support the K7V offers support for all current AMD Athlon/Duron processors including the new 400MHz FSB processors. The board also supports a maximum of 2GBs of DDR333/400 in single channel mode. While the board would be quite lite on features the VT8237 Southbridge helps provide the K7V with some essential features. Features such as Serial ATA RAID, Parallel ATA133, USB 2.0 and 6-Channel Audio are all supported via the VT8237 Southbridge. Abit also took the liberty of adding an integrated 10/100 Ethernet controller as this has become a common motherboard component.