Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra KT400A Review (8)
Overclocker 23 Mar 2003

If you think this is the conclusion, you're wrong. It is just the beginning we we will see more KT400A boards available. After a few days of testing using the E2 BIOS, we did find that the performance of the board based on KT400A is good. In our tests, we were unable to set it to 2-5-2 and we have to ease off the timings to 2-6-2. We also discovered that forcing the BIOS to run at Ultra timing boost the performance close to nForce2, it is relatively unstable in 3DMark2001SE as it hangs the system very often. We have to settle for CAS 2, 2-6-2 Turbo (refer to gallery 3 for bios screen shots). At these timings, we were able to run it steadily. It is as fast or faster than the SiS 746FX but need some more tweaks to compete in performance with the nForce2. Both nForce2 and the KT400A boards are weak in disk performance resulting in a slower performance in Content Creation and Business Applications.

As we have mentioned on the mainpage, the 7VAXP-A Ultra has impressive features e.g. 6 ch audio, IDE RAID, SATA ports, LAN, 1394, USB 2.0, Dual BIOS etc. It also has Easytune4 for overclocking within Windows and BIOS (except multiplier using dip switch). Overclocking-wise, this board does provide the voltage tweaks, memory settings, FSB, Multiplier control etc. The only problem is that the BIOS auto set ranges to 100~132, 133~165, 166~250 depending on the CPU used. There is also no Fix PCI/AGP. Well we do hope that we can see that in future BIOS updates. In our tests, we used a AXP2700+ and we set multiplier down to 9x. We can achieve 185Mhz FSB stable. Would this be due to a divider at work. Well it's highly possible.

Documentation of the board is easy to understand and the colour coding on the board is a very good way to prevent accidentally shorting the SoftPower, reset connectors with other pins.

Overall, this board is feature rich. I am sure a newer BIOS can push its performance higher.

(Related Reviews/Galleries : AOpen AK79GMax nforce2 board, SiS 746FX Ref Board, ECS L7S7A SiS746 Mainboard, Iwill K7S2 Gallery)

Discuss
Write to Editor

Pros 好处:

Product Excellence

(C) Copyright 1998-2009 OCWorkbench.com