The Board
This motherboard has all the usual connections on it, and standards, but there is something, which I’ve not seen on a KT133 motherboard, and this is an AGP Pro slot, such a slot is only needed for a High-end graphics card, but even so it is still nice to see it here.| North Bridge | Via KT133 |
| South Bridge | VIA686B |
| Memory | 1.5GB |
| AGP Interface | Agp Pro 4X Mode |
| Audio | Built in AC97 codec |
| I/O | 4x USB Ports, 1x FDD port, 2x com Ports, irDA, PS/2 Mouse, PS/2 Keyboard |
| IDE | 2x Ultra 33/66/100 Ide Ports |
| PCI | 5 Pci Slots |
| ISA | 1 ISA Slot |
As usual there is the 2 USB slots. But one thing they have put on there, which I personally hate, is the onboard sound, I do not see the need for this, but it can be easily disabled. Another nice feature that they have included is the UDMA
100, even though in the Hexus labs we run SCSI we decided to do a benchmark on the UDMA 100 Controller. At the moment UDMA 100 isn’t a lot faster than UDMA 66. We used a UDMA 100 drive on the board and we couldn’t notice any MASSIVE speed increases. The benchmark show it is running fast, at 19K in SI Soft, but we didn’t notice any difference in this from normal UDMA 66 performance. But it is nice to see the future Proofing of the motherboards.
As you can see it has good performance for a UDMA 66 Drive, and yes it is larger on this than on other mainboard we have tested it on but we didn’t notice is being lightening fast. It is still IDE at the end of the day.
