X-bit labs

ABIT KV7 Mainboard on VIA KT600 Chipset Review (page 5)

Category: Mainboards

by Grigoriy Gubankov

[ 11/25/2003 | 11:19 PM ]

The CPU voltage regulator circuit is at the very top of the PCB, too.

Although the mainboard is inexpensive, ABIT used a three-phase CPU voltage regulator circuit in it. Maybe the company thinks that even the most undemanding user might one day try out overclocking? Just to remind you: more phases in the CPU voltage regulator circuit make the voltage purer and the system with the overclocked processor (and especially with increased CPU voltage) – more stable. The memory in the ABIT KV7, on the contrary, is powered by a linear regulator.

You can see one more curtsey to the overclockers in the CPU socket neighborhood: four holes for coolers like Zalman CNPS7000 or processor blocks of liquid (or cryogen :) cooling solutions. The last feature of the “overclocking image” of this mainboard is the active cooler mounted on the chipset North Bridge. The MSI KT6 Delta also used active cooling for the chipset North Bridge, but that mainboard was not positioned as a budget product. The value ASUS A7V600, on the contrary, features a passive cooling solution on the North Bridge. Actually, KT600-based mainboards don’t necessarily need active North Bridge cooling; this is rather an “image-making” move. By the way, the maximum rotational speed of the fan on the ABIT KV7 North Bridge is about 4,700rpm. It is quiet and can be made even quieter with the help of FanEQ technology.

BIOS Setup and Overclocking

The ABIT KV7 uses the BIOS from Phoenix-Award, as other ABIT products do. The main menu of the BIOS Setup is ordinary, so let’s browse through the main sections: SoftMenu Setup, Advanced Chipset Features and PC Health Status.

The SoftMenu Setup page is designed the same way they do it for any of the latest mainboards from ABIT. You can set up the FSB frequency, PCI/AGP divisor and CPU multiplier according to several presets (in our case, you can choose from 2500+, 2600+, 2800+ and two versions for 3000+ and 3200+ with a different FSB frequency) or set up everything manually. In the latter case, you can change the FSB frequency from 100 to 250MHz with 1MHz increment. New BIOSes from Phoenix-Award allow typing the value in without scrolling through a long list. You can then set up the divisors for the PCI and AGP busses with respect to the FSB frequency (6:2:1, 5:2:1, 4:2:1 and 3:2:1) and select the CPU multiplier from 5 to 22.5 with variable increments.

The Power Supply page comes next. The name is true – we can adjust the voltages here: Vcore (from 1.1V to 2.325V with 0.025V increment), Vmem (2.5-2.8V with variable increment from 0.05V to 0.1V), AGP (1.5V-1.65V with 0.05V stepping) and North Bridge (2.55V-2.95V with 0.05V-0.1V increment). The CPU voltage range is really wide, enough for any overclocking experiments. The rest of the ranges are not that wide (save for the North Bridge, but its optimal voltage range is not at all clear).

This page also contains a mysterious parameter called CPU Fast Command Decode. Without delving deep, I would just like to say that “at Normal” leads to a higher stability of the system, while “at Fast” provides a slightly higher performance. I preferred “at Normal”, because “at Fast” the system worked somewhat unstably.