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• Albatron KX400-8XV, VIA KT400A Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• AOpen AK77-400 Max, VIA KT400A Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• DFI KT400A Lan Party, VIA KT400A Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• EPoX 8K9A9I, VIA KT400A Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• Gigabyte GA-7VAXP-A Ultra, VIA KT400A Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• Jetway Polaris 400A, VIA KT400A Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• MSI KT4A Ultra, VIA KT400A Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• Soltek SL-KT400A-L, VIA KT400A Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0, NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra400 Chipset, Socket A Athlon XP DDR Motherboard
• AMD Athlon XP3200+ 'Barton' @ 11 x 166MHz FSB (1.83GHz, XP2500+)
• 2 x 256Mb Corsair PC3200 DDR Memory Modules (CAS2, 2-5-2)
• Sapphire ATI Radeon R9700 Pro 128MB
• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• ATI CATALYST 3.4
• Quake3 v1.30
• 3DMark 2001 Professional Second Edition v330
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Demo
• Comanche 4 Demo Benchmark
• Hexus version of PiFast version 4.1, by Xavier Gourdon
• LAME v3.92 MMX and RazorLame 1.1.5 front end
• Unreal Tournament 2003 Retail v2225
• Hexus SETI Benchmark
Testing the boards was simple. Getting past the fact that none of the KT400A boards natively support the XP3200+ in 11 x 200MHz mode, the simplest way to benchmark the boards was to turn down the front side bus speed to 166MHz to automagically convert the XP3200+ into an XP2500+. Re-benchmarking our Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 at XP2500+ speeds was a snap too.
A Corsair TwinX 3200LL kit, 512MB from 2 sticks, was used to populate each board with memory. Being a single channel memory controller based chipset, KT400A gets no benefit from running 2 sticks over a single 512MB module at the same timings, bar some latency discrepancies to do with internal chipset timings. nForce2 however enables its dual channel mode with 2 sticks in the right slots, so the board gets benchmarked in that configuration. CAS2, Tras of 5, Trcd of 2 and active precharge delay of 2 (2-5-2-2) in all cases on all boards.
My Sapphire 9700 Pro rounds things off, giving some high performance AGP8X loving to each board. AGP8X running was fine on each board, no problems encountered at all in that respect. Fast writes were enabled and on the VIA board, V-Link rate of 8X was selected for maximum inter bridge bandwidth.
Software wise, it's our stock testing kit with no changes.
I'll cover graphical benchmarks first, non graphical benchmarks last.
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