Articles: Mainboards

ABIT KV7 Mainboard on VIA KT600 Chipset Review (page 8) [11/25/2003 11:19 PM | Mainboards]
by Grigoriy Gubankov

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Performance

Let’s now measure the performance level of the ABIT V7 mainboard in our traditional benchmarks. The testbed hasn’t changed since the previous test session:

CPU	Athlon XP 3200+
Mainboard	ABIT KV7
Memory	2x256MB Corsair XMS3200C2
HDD	Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40GB
Graphics card	ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Chipset driver	VIA Hyperion 4.48
Graphics driver	ATI Catalyst 3.6

The VIA KT600 chipset is rather fastidious about memory settings, while the reviewed mainboard provides high flexibility with respect to those settings. So, I would like to offer you a snapshot of the BIOS page with the settings I used in the tests:

Before proceeding to the actualtest results, I have one more thing to point out. It’s no secret some manufacturers increase the FSB clock-rate of their mainboards above the standard so that their products could boast an advantage compared to competitors which don’t resort to such tricks. This is not right, since it is none other but overclocking and overclocking should be only performed by the user and voluntarily. Let’s see whether ABIT is tricky:

They are! The FSB frequency is 2.8MHz (1.4%) above the nominal. Considering that the bus overclocking means an automatic growth of all the other frequencies (CPU, memory, AGP and PCI), the real performance gain might be even higher than 1.4%. You should keep this in mind when checking the following table:

	ABIT KV7	ASUS A7V600	MSI KT6 Delta	DFI LAN PARTY (nForce2)
Business Winstone 2002, Score	32.8	32.5	33.8	36.7
Content Creation Winstone 2003, Score	39.6	39.1	39.5	40.9
3DMark2001 SE, Score	15806	15806	16342	16504
3Dmark03, Score	4962	4937	5194	5033
3DMark03, CPU Score	565	549	567	641
PCMark2002, CPU Score	6760	6666	6734	6826
PCMark2002, Memory Score	5495	5442	5654	6242
SiSoft Sandra Int RAM Buffered Bandwidth	2761	2739	2871	2897
UT2003, dm-antalus, 1024x768x32	66.72	66.52	68.58	72.26
Serious Sam SE, The Grand Cathedral, 1024x768x32	104.8	103.9	108.6	111.9

Well, the mainboard showed rather average performance. Notwithstanding the above-the-nominal FSB frequency, the ABIT mainboard could only significantly outperform the ASUS A7V600 (and be a little faster than the MSI KT6 Delta) in one test only, Content Creation Winstone 2003. In other tests, the mainboard from ABIT showed the same or a little better level of performance compared to the solution from ASUS. And it is a long way behind the leader among KT600-based mainboards we have reviewed so far, the MSI KT6 Delta.

Conclusion

We have just reviewed a mainboard on the VIA KT600 chipset, which is a good representative of the budget class. The mainboard conforms to this positioning with its good integrated functions, particularly, very good sound and Serial ATA (thanks to the VT8237 South Bridge). At the same time, ABIT always known for overclocking friendly mainboards provided its KV7 with good overclocking opportunities. It’s another question whether you will be able to take the full advantage of them or not.

Anyway, that’s not crucial for a budget solution. The mainboard is stable at its regular frequencies, and I encountered no problems with its fucntioning. Overall, the ABIT KV7 performs the role the manufacturer cast it for, well enough. The price is appropriate, too. You can purchase this mainboard for about $70.