The KT7A was one of the last holdouts to have an ISA slot, so if you want to use an ISA sound card that's a major plus. It's why I bought one in September of 2001 - I suddenly needed a Socket A motherboard, and I wanted to be able to continue to use my ISA hardware modem as dial up was my only option at the time. KT7A guy has a thread on this board that will give you all of the ups and downs, but you already have one so that's half of the battle.
Abit KT7A (KT133A/VIA686B), Athlon XP Mobile 2500+

Abit KT7A-(raid) is one of the best boards if you want a system that can cover as much of the 90's as possible because of its ISA slot: it was built with an eye towards the past (SDRAM support, ISA) and an eye towards the future (FSB 266MHZ support).
However for an ultimate build for the year 2000 is far from being a good choice. I tested all chipsets for socket A and the best which one could buy in 2000 is the AMD760. The board you want is Abit KG7-RAID providing the best performance for the year 2000, 15% better than KT7A-RAID.
By the way which 1200 you got: 1200B with 200FSB or 1200C with 266FSB?

nd22 wrote on Yesterday, 00:31:

Abit KT7A-(raid) is one of the best boards if you want a system that can cover as much of the 90's as possible because of its ISA slot: it was built with an eye towards the past (SDRAM support, ISA) and an eye towards the future (FSB 266MHZ support).
However for an ultimate build for the year 2000 is far from being a good choice. I tested all chipsets for socket A and the best which one could buy in 2000 is the AMD760. The board you want is Abit KG7-RAID providing the best performance for the year 2000, 15% better than KT7A-RAID.
By the way which 1200 you got: 1200B with 200FSB or 1200C with 266FSB?

Thank you for the motherboard suggestion. I have the 266FSB 1200C, was kind of a random find.

If you got an ISA sound card such as AWE64 than KT7A would make an awesome machine for DOS. If you got a PCI card such as creative live and therefore you plan a Windows 9X machine than KG7 would be better and be ideally suited for the ultimate year 2000 build.
That being said with a 1200C and KT7A you would still get very good performance for the 1997-2000 games.
Be aware that building the "ultimate" of any kind can be very expensive.

Regarding the ISA slot on the KT7A-RAID, I have found that it ia great for DOS with a Soundblaster 16 (CT2290 in my case) but I had problems with a Yamaha YMF 719 board. Not sure if it was the motherboard that was the issue or just that my 1.4Ghz Thunderbird was too fast?

RetroPCCupboard wrote on Yesterday, 08:54:

Regarding the ISA slot on the KT7A-RAID, I have found that it ia great for DOS with a Soundblaster 16 (CT2290 in my case) but I had problems with a Yamaha YMF 719 board. Not sure if it was the motherboard that was the issue or just that my 1.4Ghz Thunderbird was too fast?

CPU speed is unlikely to be an issue as the FSB speeds(200Mhz or 266 Mhz) are so much faster than the ISA standard speed(8.33Mhz, but sometimes they use 8 Mhz as it is a "prettier" number, there is also the "high speed"(No longer a proper naming with later HW 😁) clock signal that is about ~14.3Mhz, but that is also much too slow in relation to the FSB), that they almost surely have decoupled the ISA bus from the FSB. The only way that the CPU speed can cause issues with the Yamaha YMF 719 board if they made some timing loop in the driver CPU speed dependant.

Just a friendly advice: if I were you I would drop the ultimate and just build it with what I got.
You already have the the brain - 1200c processor and the heart - Abit kt7a-raid board. You can get some 256 modules of SDRAM for cheap and a geforce4 ti 4200 card and you got yourself a system that will play all games from the late 90's at 60+ fps.
Be extra careful with the power supply: 25A on the 5V rail are required for such a system.

nd22 wrote on Yesterday, 11:11:

Just a friendly advice: if I were you I would drop the ultimate and just build it with what I got.
You already have the the brain - 1200c processor and the heart - Abit kt7a-raid board. You can get some 256 modules of SDRAM for cheap and a geforce4 ti 4200 card and you got yourself a system that will play all games from the late 90's at 60+ fps.
Be extra careful with the power supply: 25A on the 5V rail are required for such a system.

The whole "ultimate" thing is literally the point of the build. I already have several vintage PCs to fill this niche so this is just for the fun and challenge. Thanks for the reminder on the PSU.