ABIT KT7A-RAID

Company: ABIT
Product: KT7A-RAID Motherboard
Street Price: ~ $160
Complete Motherboard Spec's: ABIT-USA Spec's
Date Reviewed: January 30, 2001
Reviewed By: Jason

Benchmarks:

No doubt by now you have read a million KT7 reviews, but I bet you are wondering how much performance gain you get from the 133FSB vs. the older 100FSB. Well, I took a Duron 800 (8 x 100) and ran a lot of benchmarks at 100FSB (with the Memory at +33), then I changed the FSB but kept the final speed at 800Mhz (133 x 6). This way all the benchmarks have a common dominator (The final 800MHz) and the only difference is the FSB, which is the whole reason of the new KT133A chip.

Just so you know the test setup, here's what it consisted of:

First and foremost, the SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks. If you haven't nabbed the latest 2001 version, I highly recommend downloading it. As you can see from the numbers, raw CPU performance & MultiMedia (3DNow performance basically) doesn't change, but memory gains a nice increase. Is this performance enough to justify an upgrade from the KT7 to the KT7A?

Sandra Benchmarks
CPU - 100FSB	CPU - 133FSB
Memory - 100FSB	Memory - 133FSB
MultiMedia - 100FSB	MultiMedia - 133FSB

Another benchmark that is a little more real world is Mad Onion's 3DMark 2000. Keep in mind, all times the CPU was at 800MHz, just either 100FSB or 133FSB. I used a Geforce 2 GTS video card for these benchmarks. Stock speed is 200 core & 333 memory, overclocked is 240 core and 390 memory. Upping the FSB helped a few hundred 3DMarks, which is okay, but still nothing drastic.

3DMark 2000
Stock - 100FSB	Stock - 133FSB
OC - 100FSB	OC - 133FSB

Quake 3 Arena is the ultimate real world performance benchmark, as it stresses all areas of a PC system to it's limits. I installed a clean copy of quake, installed the 1.17 Patch, loaded the program and went straight to the system settings, all I changed were the video related options to the settings shown below. Then I ran the demo001 for the FPS numbers.

At the lower resolutions there is again a slight performance increase, but as you increase the resolution, other bottlenecks start to come into play, no doubt buying an Ultra would help out performance at higher resolutions, but also a faster CPU would help out too.

Go To Page 3 For Overclocking & Conclusion