Computex 2000 Coverage Day 2: Motherboards

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Since the BX chipset still is far from its death, ABIT did show off their next BX board which they are calling the BX-100. The '100' in its name denotes the support for ATA 100 hard drives as the board features an on-board HPT370 controller from HighPoint. We asked ABIT why they insisted on using HighPoint controllers for Ultra ATA 66/100 support instead of using Promise or CMD parts, their primary reason was because they have an exclusive agreement with HighPoint that allows them to use the controllers on motherboards a couple of months before other manufacturers have access to them.

Other than the fact that the board is a Socket-370 design and features the HPT370 controller it is essentially a BE6-II.

Speaking of which, ABIT will be producing a Revision 1.2 of the BE6-II that has the new HPT370 controller instead of the older HPT366 which only supported ATA 66. Basically the BE6-II Revision 1.2 will be a Slot-1 version of the BX-100.

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One of our top picks for Athlon boards was the KA7 and around the launch of the board ABIT mentioned that they would be releasing a version of the board with an on-board HPT370 controller thus adding ATA 100 support to the KA7. Nothing special here, but we have a picture of the aforementioned board, the KA7-100 in the picture above.

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The new Athlon entry from ABIT is the KT7 which is basically a Socket-A/KT133 version of the KA7-100. We won't see the KT7 for at least another month or so and there is no word as to whether or not it will have any features that the KA7 lacked. But with the KA7 already claiming the title of most flexible (in terms of BIOS settings) KX133 motherboard, just by sharing that feature set the KT7 should be pretty successful.