Articles: Mainboards

Review of MSI KT4A Ultra Mainboard on VIA KT400A Chipset (page 11) [07/13/2003 11:41 PM | Mainboards]
by Grigoriy Gubankov

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So, now that we keep this fact in mind, let’s check out the numeric results of our tests:

	VIA KT400A, PC2700	SiS746FX, PC2700	SiS746FX, PC3200
Business Winstone 2002, Score	30.5	32.3	32.3
Content Creation Winstone 2003, Score	37.8	37.4	37.7
3DMark2001 SE, Score	14538	14131	14200
3DMark03, Score	4844	4902	4913
3DMark03, CPU Score	503	484	496
PCMark2002, CPU Score	6453	6464	6473
PCMark2002, Memory Score	4753	4548	4629
UT2003, dm-antalus, 1024x768	59.64	57.88	57.98
UT2003, flyby-antalus, 1024x768	167.14	162.8	163.25
UT2003, dm-antalus, 640x480	59.70	57.82	58.18
UT2003, flyby-antalus, 640x480	172.82	167.31	168.16
RTCW, Checkpoint, 1024x768, High Quality	139.8	135.5	136.9
RTCW, Checkpoint, 640x480, Fastest	164.8	158.3	160.8

First of all, we have to point out that SiS746FX is noticeably far ahead in Business Winstone, which is probably provided by the high quality IDE driver, because the work with the disk subsystem takes a considerable part of the test (saving and loading files). In other benchmarks the chipsets perform more or less equally: the maximum performance difference throughout the whole test session was not more than 4.2% in the synthetic PCMark2002 test. Also it is worth pointing out that SiS746FX didn’t gain a lot when the memory was replaced with the faster PC3200. It is probably the bus of Athlon XP processor, which features lower bandwidth than the memory with all the resulting consequences. It would be also very interesting to take a look at the KT400A performance in this case, because the FastStream64 algorithm should definitely contribute to the performance improvement. Unfortunately, we can’t check it out this time.

Conclusion

After reading this article you may have though that the reviewed MSI mainboard is not a very successful product. It is not quite correct. As you can see, the major problems we discovered have to do with extreme overclocking settings. When you work in the nominal mode, there are no problems at all. Maybe the only thing to be mentioned is the use of PC3200 and 333MHz bus. So, if you are looking for a reliable basis for your home system, and if you are not going to torture your mainboard in extreme overclocking attempts, then this MSI product is a good choice. However, if you are an overclocking fan, we wouldn’t recommend buying this solution, which costs around $80-$90.

As for the competition between VIA KT400A and SiS746FX, there is not much to be said here. Both solutions perform almost equally fast and offer similar features set with the only exception of PC3200 support. Both these products are not brand new already, because VIA KT600 and SiS748 will very soon conquer the mass market and offer the users support of AMD Athlon XP processors with 200MHz bus. However, if you don’t need this support, you can feel quite at home with the solutions discussed today in this article: they are better value and offer practically the same set of features.