ABIT SD7-533 SiS645 (6)
Overclocker 8 Feb 2002 

Conclusion

ABIT SD7-533 is a good performer and it has proven itself to be very close to the Ref SiS645 board we tested months ago. We just have a feeling that it could even be better as we are not able to run DDR333 under the Ultra timings. The best timings we did for DDR333 was Turbo. As we can see from the benchmark numbers, the SiS645 based ABIT SD7-533 brought down the price/performance ratio and gives you an assurance of performance even at DDR266 and better at DDR333.

This board has a number of onboard features like SoftMenuIII which makes overclocking it relatively simple. There is also a 6 channel audio on board, if paired with a DVD, you would have a simple yet powerful home theatre system. Installation is very straightforward, we did not encounter any major hiccups so far. The only annoying thing is the way the ram timings for SDR:AGP:PCI in the SoftmenuIII, they should have just indicated the FSB instead of putting up numbers and expect us to go and get a calculator to calculate what speed our RAM, PCI and AGP is running at. The manual also didn't explain very clearly on this point.

We were able to take this board up to a maximum of 115Mhz fsb. In fact, if you are able to get hold of a Engineer Sample of P4 which the multiplier can be reduced, it is possible to reach a high of 165Mhz. The SoftMenuIII also has user defined options which allows you to run async at 100/75 which has a similar effect of -33Mhz  (e.g. CPU at 133Mhz, RAM at 100Mhz).

Below, we list down some pros and cons of this board :

Pros:

• 1Mhz FSB, Vcore adjustable 
• SoftMenuIII

Cons:

• Confusing settings in SoftMenuIII
• Ultra can't be used at DDR333

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 5 stars.

Gold Award 2002

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