|
THE
BIOS
The
BIOS is one of the KT7A-RAID's strong
points. You've got control over all on-board
features, tweaks for memory and Abit's powerful
Softmenu III. We snapped a few quick shots
to give you an idea what to expect.
 |
| Overclocking
With The Abit KT7A-RAID |
| Almost
Perfect |
|
Thanks
to Softmenu III, overclocking with the KT7A-RAID
is excellent. The other thing going for
Athlon over-clockers is the ability to
"un-lock" the multiplier on Thunderbirds
very easily by shorting the L1 traces with a
conductive pencil. We were lucky enough to
have a 750MHz Thunderbird that was able to hit
1.1GHz! We tested with both a 100MHz bus at
750MHz (7.5X100) and with a 133MHz bus at 1.064GHz (8x133).
The
H.H. Test Rig was configured as follows....
 |
| Test
System |
| The
baseline for performance |
|
Abit KT7A-RAID (VIA
KT133A) with an AMD T-Bird @ 750MHz &
1.064GHz.
128MB
of Mushkin 2-2-2 Rev. 2 RAM
IBM
DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drives (RAID
0)
nVidia
GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card
Adaptec
AHA-2940UW Pro SCSI Controller
Plextor
UltraPLEX 40Max
Windows
Millennium
Direct
X 8.0a and nVidia reference drivers V.6.50
VIA
Chipset drivers (v4.29)
 |
| Processor
Performance |
| Some
Q3 & the Biz... |
|
To
test performance of the KT7A-RAID, we ran Business
Winstone, Content Creation Winstone, some low-res
Quake 3 tests and a barrage SiSoft Sandra tests. First
up let's see how the KT7A-RAID fares against the
DDR equipped Shuttle AV30 in Quake 3 Arena. QUAKE
3
 The
KT7A-RAID bests the AV30 by over 10FPS in the
low-res Quake 3 test. That is a significant
margin considering the AV30 was using DDR RAM. To
simulate some "real-world" performance
we ran Business Winstone... BUSINESS
WINSTONE
 Again
we see the KT7A beat the AV30 by almost 10%.
This test was run with a single hard drive.
With a RAID 0 configuration the margin of victory
would be even greater.
Sandra
and CC Winstone |
