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If anyone has
ever been part of a team, not just in sports but in any part
of life, there is one valuable lesson to learn and that is
competition within the team makes the team better.
There are many reasons for this. Competitiveness
pushes individuals on the team to perform at higher levels
to ensure their spot on the team. The ones that don't
play a starting role, nevertheless, keep working hard trying
to become that next strong player on the team. In any
event, competition is a good thing. Competition is
even better when it comes to computer technology. With
every new piece of technology that gets announced, the top
players in the industry flaunt their hardware sporting this
new technology. Who's product is better? Which
company has the better name? Readers like you then
jump to PC Hardware sites and get the scoop on how the new
technology performs. This, my friends, is competition
at its best. These companies are fighting for your
hard-earned Benjamins and in doing so are constantly
improving the final product. This can only mean one
thing, we are the winners of this ongoing endeavor of the
hardware game.
Intel and AMD
have been waging battle for some time now obviously and to
claim highest performance over all, is the almighty crown.
Intel pushes the envelope with megahertz while AMD offers
"slower" processors that perform more efficiently and seem
to execute just as quickly. Motherboard chipsets offer
the latest support to get the most speed and efficiency out
of these brand spanking new processors. While dual
channel DDR memory support has been all the talk lately,
there are still some other chipsets out there that offer
similar performance with single channel solutions. For
AMD'ers, Nvidia's nForce2 chipset seems to be the perfect
match, but VIA has ideas of their own. Today we take a
look at Gigabyte's motherboard sporting VIA's latest chipset
the KT400A. The Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra has many of the
bells and whistles one could hope for. However, while
the KT400A chipset does not offer dual channel DDR memory,
it offers what VIA likes to call, a "more efficient" memory
architecture which will compete and possibly surpass the
nForce2. Is this it? Have we found an nForce2
killer? Grab a seat and get comfy while we give you
the inside scoop as to how this motherboard performs.
Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra: Featureset
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Via
KT400A - Gigabyte's Ultra KT400A Motherboard |
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Feature Rich |
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Gigabyte 7VAXP-A
Ultra KT400A Motherboard
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Chipset
Via KT400A Memory / AGP / PCI Controller
( PAC )
Via VT8235
Integrated Peripheral Controller ( PSIPC )
Processor
Socket A Processor AMD Athlon / Athlon XP /
Duron ( K7 ) 128K L1 & 512K / 256K 64K L2 cache
on die
200 / 266 / 333MHz FSB and DDR Bus speeds
Supports 1.4GHz and faster
Memory
3 184-pin DDR sockets
Supports DDR DRAM PC2100 / PC2700 / PC3200
Supports up to 3.0GB DDR ( Max )
Supports only 2.5V DDR DIMM
I/O Control
IT8705
Expansion Slots
1 AGP Slot supports 8X / 4X / 2X mode ( 1.5V ) &
AGP 3.0 Compliant
5 PCI Slots supports
33MHz & PCI 2.2 Compliant
On-Board Peripherals
1 Floppy supports 2 FDD with 360K, 720K, 1.2M,
1.44M and 2.88M bytes
1 Parallel port supports Normal / EPP / ECP mode
2 Serial ports ( COMA & COMB )
6 x USB 2.0 / 1.1 ( 4 by cable )
3 x IEEE 1394 by cable
1 IrDA connector for IR
1 Smart Card Reader connector for SCR
On-Board Sound
Realtek ALC650 CODEC
Line Out / 2 front speaker
Line In / 2 rear speaker ( by s/w switch )
Mic In / center & subwoofer ( by s/w switch )
SPDIF Out / SPDIF In
CD In / AUX In / Game port
On-Board LAN
Realtek RTL8100BL
On-Board IEEE 1394
Via VT6306
On-Board IDE
2 IDE Controllers provides IDE HDD / CD-ROM (
IDE1, IDE2 ) with PIO, Bus Master ( UltraDMA 33
/ ATA66 / ATA100 / ATA133 ) operation modes
IDE3 and IDE4 Compatible with RAID, Ultra ATA
133 / 100, EIDE
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On-Board RAID
Onboard Promise
PDC20276
Supports data
striping ( RAID 0 ) or mirroring ( RAID 1 )
Supports
concurrent dual IDE controller operation
Supports IDE Bus
Master operation
Displays status
and error checking messages on start up
Mirroring
supports automatic background rebuilds
Features LBA and
Extended Interrupt 13 drive translation in
controller onboard BIOS
On-Board SATA RAID
Onboard Silicon Image Sil3112A
Supports disk striping ( RAID 0 ) or DISK
Mirroring ( RAID 1 )
Supports UDMA up to 150 MB/s
AIL UDMA and PIO Modes
Up to 2 SATA Devices
ACPI and ATA / ATAPI6
H/W Monitoring
CPU / System Fan Revolution Detect
CPU / System Temperature Detect
System Voltage Detect
Thermal Shutdown function
PS/2 Connector
PS/2 Keyboard interface and PS/2 Mouse
interface
BIOS
Licensed Award BIOS, 2Mbit flash ROM
Supports Dual BIOS / Q-Flash
Overclocking
Over Voltage ( DDR / AGP / CPU ) by BIOS
Over Clock ( DDR / AGP / CPU / PCI ) by BIOS
Additional Features
PS/2 Keyboard power on by password, PS/2 Mouse
power on
External Modem wake up
STR ( Suspend-To-RAM )
Wake on LAN ( WOL )
AC Recovery
Poly fuse for keyboard over-current protection
USB KB/Mouse wake up from S3
Supports @BIOS
Supports EasyTune 4
Form Factor
30.5cm x 24.4cm ATX size form factor
4 layers PCB
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Via KT400A Architecture
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In the diagram above, its
easy to see that the KT400A chipset is feature-rich and
Gigabyte has not left anything out. The Gigabyte
7VAXP-A Ultra, is named rightly so. This
motherboard incorporates all of the KT400A's
capabilities. RAID support is offered in both the
IDE and SATA flavors. There is support for USB
2.0, Firewire, and much more. Let's take a closer
look at the motherboard itself and see how all of these
features were laid out.
A Closer Look:
Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra
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