Enlight's BareBones AMD / KT133 System


Enlight's BareBones AMD / KT133 System - Page 2

Enlight's Bare Bones AMD / KT133 System
Mid Sized Socket A Athlon Performance

By Dave Altavilla - November 10, 2000

 
Other than the case itself, you do get three other components with the Enlight KT133 Bare-Bones unit, Gigabyte's GA-7ZX KT133 Motherboard, LiteON's 48X CD-ROM and a Floppy Drive.  We won't bore you to tears with detail on the floppy but the other two components are fairly sexy.  So, lets have a look.

Enlight Bare-Bones Test System
Just add a dash of Video, CPU, RAM, a Drive and you have a system!

Enlight 7238 Mid Tower ATX Case with 300W Power Supply, AMD Athlon 750 (T-Bird), Gigabyte GA-7ZX KT133 Motherboard, 128MB of Corsair PC133 SDRAM (get yours at Outside Loop!), IBM 15G 7200RPM ATA100 Drive, Hercules Prophet II 64 GeForce2 GTS 64MB, LiteOn 48X CD-ROM,
Windows 98SE, Direct X 7.0a, nVidia Reference Drivers version 6.31

 

Installation / Setup Of The Enlight Bare-Bones
The GA-7ZX KT133 Motherboard and LiteON 48X CD-ROM

 

 

Without going through the entire list of specs again for you, there are a few details of this Gigabyte Socket A board that should be mentioned.  First, this board doesn't have CPU setup in the BIOS.  Everything needs to be configured via dip switches.  While these are certainly better than jumper banks, power users may have grown accustomed to a "SoftMenu" interface and may feel having to open the case, is less than optimal.  However, Gigabyte does offer "Easy Tune" software for over-clocking in the Windows environment which does simplify things nicely.  More on this in our over-clocking section.

 

Another point of reference is that this board does not have voltage adjustments whatsoever nor does it have CPU multiplier adjustments.  As a result, the "hard core" crowd may find the GA-7ZX a little limiting with respect to running things out of spec. 

 

On the upside however, the GA-7ZX does have a nice layout with excellent quality throughout.  The board was extremely stable in all of our tests and setup in general was a piece of cake.  System Integrators will have no problem with this board as it is very easy to work with and not even the slightest bit finicky.  So, how about that CD-ROM?

 

 

Yes Sir, that there is a LiteOn 48X CD-ROM Model LTN-485S.  Nothing special to report here as it has the usual configuration of I/O on the back panel.  It is a fairly quiet drive with not a lot of vibration being radiated once running inside the Enlight case.  What is probably more interesting to you is the performance.  Let's just dig in then, shall we?

 

 

Benchmarks With The LiteOn 48X CD-ROM
The speed is in there...

 

 

CD Speed 99 - CD-ROM Performance Test

 

 

You might be thinking "what's this 26X performance from a 48X drive?"  Well, for starters as you may or may not know, CD-ROM drives rarely perform to their advertised performance level.  We are not sure why this is but literally every drive we test turns out this way.  However, compared to the Shuttle 56X CD-ROM we tested not long ago, the LiteOn unit comes very close to the performance level of a drive that is 8X it superior.

 

Sandra CD Benchmark

 

 

Once again, great performance from a 48X CD Drive here.  Let's see what else is ticking within the Enlight Bare-Bones setup.

 

Motherboard / System Benchmarks And Over-Clocking !

 

Tags:  AMD, Barebone, system, Barebones, T1, bar, STEM, NES, One, light, AR, AM, K

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