Review: VIA KT400A Roundup

Non Graphical Benchmarks

Three non-graphical tests to round off the benchmark proceedings. It's all much of a muchness so far, all the boards are essentially identical in performance and they're not too much slower than nForce2. Will we see the same?

The lower the better here, this test benefits from a large CPU cache, low latency memory accesses and good memory bandwidth. I adjusted the scale for effect to wake you up, it's been hard going to get this far. In reality, it's all much the same as we've seen before, boring as that may be. nForce2 is measurably quicker and all the KT400A's jumble up near each other to fight over the scraps. Can you guess what the main conclusion will say yet?

This is much the same test, just it doesn't take nearly 3 hours to complete. Low latency memory accesses and a fast CPU do the business here. Big cache doesn't really matter as much, but since each board uses the same processor, that point is rather moot. Look, nForce2 is quicker than the the KT400A boards which all bunch up. Yawn.

And to round things off, I present you with the silliest graph ever. LAME is entirely CPU limited, to the point of making it a slightly silly test in this company of boards. But it makes me laugh, maybe you'll get one too.

The MSI had to take the piss, I could almost hear it laughing at me. I bet it saw me coming, being the last board on the bench, and overclocked itself ever so slightly to make this graph the riot it is.

Ah well, we needed some laughs somewhere I guess.

Does that mean we can come to some kind of conclusion?