The Acorp 7KT266A Motherboard Review
More KT266A Action In The House!

By, Jeff Bouton
January 23, 2002

 

 
Overclocking Acorp 7KT266A Motherboards
Is it worth it??

When it came to overclocking the 7KT266A, we were not impressed.  Without the ability to adjust the CPU multiplier, we were limited to adjusting the BUS-speed only.  Although the system ran fine at its default 133MHz. BUS, once we started to raise the frequency, stability faltered rather quickly.  After hitting just 138MHz. the system would not post without us adjusting the memory timings to their most conservative settings, more specifically, the CAS, Active to Precharge(Tras) and Active to CMD(Trcd) settings.  Once the changes were made we tried again and reached a maximum stable BUS-speed of 145MHz.  We feel it is important to note that we used the exact same components as in previous KT266A reviews where we were able to max this CPU to over 1.5GHz.  The breakdown in performance may quite possibly be with our equipment, but in this case we doubt it.  Nonetheless, we had to settle for 145MHz. BUS-Speed with the memory timings set at their most conservative.  Below youll see the results of the over clock attempt using SiSoft Sandra 2002 with the CPU running at a peak 1303MHz.

HotHardware Test Systems
Athlon All the Way!!


AMD Athlon @ 1200MHz.

Acorp 7KT266A Rev. 1.1 Via KT266A

256MB IBM PC2100 (CAS 2)

GeForce 3 Ti500 (23.11 Drivers)

Hercules Game Theater XP

Seagate Barracuda IV ATA100 7200RPM 20GB HD

Creative 52X CD-ROM

Standard Floppy Drive

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

Via 4-in-1s v.4.37's

 

Benchmarking with Sisoft Sandra 2002 Pro
Starting with the Synthetic...

The first benchmark we'll run is SiSoft Sandra 2002 Pro.  Sandra is a synthetic benchmarking application that does a fine job at comparing a system to other popular hardware configurations.  This utility demonstrates the board's performance results in relation to some reference configurations.  Will the Acorp 7KT266A hold it's own or will the competition gobble it up?  Let's take a look.

 

CPU@1200MHz.
CPU@1303MHz.

 

Multimedia@1200MHz.

Multimedia@1303MHz.


 

Memory@1200MHz.

Memory@1303MHz.



Hard Drive Performance

 

As we've seen with all aspects of the Sandra test scores, the Acorp's performance was on par with similar systems across the board.  You can see when comparing the over clocked numbers, there were some gains in the CPU tests but the memory scores yielded little extra performance.  If we were able to maintain this relatively moderate over clock with more aggressive timings, the gain would probably be more worth it.  In this case, we see little reason to stress this board beyond spec, the gains are not worth it.  But that doesn't make it a bad motherboard.  Clearly by now we can see that this board is geared toward the workstation and low-end server market rather than the high-octane enthusiasts boards that we are so used to working with.  With that said, let us move on to more 'real-world' benchmarking to see how this board performs under real stress.

The Winstones and Quake 3