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Quality and
Setup of the Acorp 7KT266A
Motherboard |
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So similar yet so different... |
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The overall
layout of the 7KT266A was well thought out with little
issues to report. This model came equipped with 1 ACR,
1 AGP and 5 PCI slots, allowing for ample expandability.
Although we doubt that too many enthusiasts would have much
use for an ACR slot, some commercial end-users will be able
to take advantage of it. Fortunately, the placement of
the ACR slot is good in relation to
the AGP slot. In most cases, when a quality video card
is installed, the 1st PCI slot is rendered inaccessible
due to IRQ sharing with the AGP slot. The way the 7KT266A is
designed, you probably wouldn't miss it anyway since it is
doubtful the average user would have a need for ACR compatibility.
With the AGP slot, we would have liked to see some
form of retention clip or lever for the video card to keep it
securely in place. The North bridge comes with a heat
sink mounted with simple thermal tape, of course we would
prefer to see a fan mounted here with the use of a
high-quality thermal epoxy, but the current design is
adequate. 3 DIMM Slots are provided
with a maximum capacity of 3GB of DDR-RAM, more than enough
room for expansion.
Acorp did yield a little
surprise for us that we are not used to seeing in the HH
labs. The 7KT266A comes with the capacity to add
"Smart LED" functionality to the system. What is that
you ask? A "Smart LED" is an extension component that
allows the status of the BIOS to be displayed on a small
display mounted on the systems case. Although this may
only appeal to the commercial user, the information
displayed can be quite useful in monitoring the systems
critical temperature, voltages and other key settings
without the need for a third party utility. This would
be a great advantage for the hardcore over clocker, however,
we still need to determine if the 7KT266A is a good over
clocking board yet. So let's take a look at the BIOS
and then we'll started seeing what we can with this board.
The BIOS of the Acorp 7KT266A:
The 7KT266A motherboard comes
equipped with the popular Award 6.0 BIOS. Aside from
decent memory adjustments and PC Health Status, this version
was rather ordinary. There is the ability to do some
over clocking but only by adjusting the BUS-Speed, neither
the BIOS nor the board itself had any multiplier adjustments
available. Although the system functioned properly, we
did find one thing curious. When we first attempted to
over clock the board and experienced errors from going too
high, we went back into the Frequency/Voltage screen to
reduce the Bus-speed. What we found was that a
voltage setting appeared that we thought was previously not
there. We didn't think much of
it but the next time we rebooted and went into the BIOS, the
voltage adjustment was no longer available.
Next we went to the website and
downloaded the latest available BIOS for the board and once
again we saw the setting appear and disappear several
different times during testing. This was a peculiar problem that we
hope will be cleared up in future BIOS updates. We
were slightly disappointed with this since we feel that it
may have made a difference in this boards over clock ability.
With that said, let's move on to the over clocking of the
7KT266A motherboard.
Overclocking and Sandra 2002
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