Such problems affected both AMD and VIA's chipset design, yet despite this the second-generation boards with AGPx4, thou much improved, continued to suffer similar problems. You now found yourself having to lock down from x4 into x2 and boards such as ATI's Radeon proved especially unstable in x4 under certain games (TDR 2000 etc.).

By the time the KT133 chipset had arrived the problems continued to show no signed of disappearing. Boards such as ABIT's KT7 appeared to be the only units that could circumvent some of the instabilities, although the fact that you needed a lot of technical knowledge to do so would be frustrating to the majority.

People should never be expected to know exactly what each individual BIOS setting in their PC does just for the sake of stability, it's not consumer friendly. However boards such as Asus's A7V were even worse because they lacked many of the bios features that allowed Abits model to be more flexible/stable.

Abit also has the advantage by having a strong consumer following and related 'Unofficial FAQ', an FAQ that should get most people out of trouble, just about all the other boards have nothing even close to this.

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