X-bit labs

ABIT KV7 Mainboard on VIA KT600 Chipset Review (page 7)

Category: Mainboards

by Grigoriy Gubankov

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

The PC Health Status page gives you a bit of information about the system. We have a lot of voltages, the CPU voltage regulator temperature – it has become fashionable to show it in the BIOS. With all this exuberance, the chipset North Bridge temperature is missing. As the mainboard allows controlling this temperature, it would be good to have some monitoring as well.

That’s about all I wanted to tell you about the BIOS Setup of the ABIT KV7 mainboard. We will now get to practical overclocking capabilities of the product. Although never positioned as an overclocker mainboard, the KV7 and its BIOS offer you numerous purely overclocking options. It’s time we checked them out in action. The methodology remains the same we used for checking the overclockability of the ASUS A7V600 and MSI KT6 Delta mainboards.

Let me briefly remind you what we will actually be doing now.

Test 1. I increase the Vcore to 1.85V, the FSB clock-rate to 166MHz, and the multiplier to x13.5, thus making the processor work at 2250MHz. After that I tested the system stability by running 3DMark2001 SE (three times), four standard demos from Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo and SPECviewperf 7.1. However, the ABIT KV7 could only make it to the Dragothic test of 3DMark2001 SE, hanging up soon after the start. I looked up in the BIOS Setup and was much surprised to see the CPU voltage regulator temperature at 90^oC! I am sure this cannot contribute to the system’s stability. So, the mainboard didn’t pass our first test.

Test 2. FSB Overclocking. I would like to say it beforehand that we cannot hope for a high result. Of course, we shouldn’t blame the mainboard for that. It’s because the AGP and PCI frequencies depend on the FSB clock-rate in mainboards on the VIA KT600 chipset. That’s why the overclocking is often limited by the AGP graphics card rather than by the mainboard itself. The ABIT KV7 just cannot compete with nForce2-based mainboards that often speed up to 230MHz FSB. Anyway, let’s see what it can, just to make sure the mainboard is all right as far as the quality of manufacture is concerned.

So, we drop the AGP speed to 4x, increase the memory timings to 2.5-3-3-7 and set it up to work synchronously with the FSB, while the CPU multiplier is reduced to x7. Moreover, I raised the chipset voltage to 2.75V. After that, I was speeding up the FSB, starting at 200MHz. The stability check was the same as in the first test. This way we performed overclocking allowed reaching 218MHz FSB frequency. This is the best result among all KT600-based mainboards we have reviewed, although just 4MHz above the result of the MSI KT6 Delta. So, we can claim that the ABIT KV7 is a quality product.