I just built a Duron 700 system on the Abit KT-7 RAID, and so far, it's been 
a very pleasant experience. I bought my MB / CPU / fan from Multiwave 
(www.mwave.com) after finding them on pricewatch.com. It was the first time I 
have dealt with Multiwave, but they really came through. I did a lot of 
checking at www.resellerratings.com, and boy do you need to be careful who 
you deal with on the net.

In the end, I saved maybe $50 over Tran on the whole deal, but waited a week 
for the parts. The heatsink / fan provided by Multiwave is in the 'adequate' 
category - I would have preferred the Global Win or Alpha cooler, but I got a 
fair deal.


On Monday 11 December 2000 23:06, you wrote:
> Most people I know have been buying AMD Thunderbirds and Abit KT7-RAID
> boards and are very happy with them.  http://www.mwave.com is probably
> cheaper on the board and chip combos, but Tran is much better on memory,
> and you don't have to pay shipping.

I've owned one Tyan board, and I would never buy another - their tech support 
is dreadful, and there were several quality control issues on my board. Also, 
FWIW, the Tyan board will *not* run a CPU overclocked. All the settings are 
there, but I can never get it to go even a hair over spec. This might be the 
fault of the K6-2 cpus, but hard to say.

I have no problems with FIC, I'm curious why Yaron is down on them. 
Generally, I find FIC to be a decent, versatile MB at a fair price. 

I would suggest building up your own system.. it's not that difficult, and 
very instructive.

-- 
Bill Layer
Sales Technician
<b.layer at vikingelectronics.com>