Review: VIA KT400A Roundup

This is going to take a page or 16 to go through. When planning this review, knowing the mountain of hardware to cover, I had to think of ways to keep page numbers down, to make sure you'd get to the end without dropping asleep or being drowned under a sea of specs and graphs.

So, to that end, I'm going to try and compress each board into two pages of discussion before we move on to the benchmarks. That means two pages to cover layout, bundle, BIOS, features and other miscellaneous notes, something I usually take 3 pages to cover in normal reviews. Hope you don't mind, it's purely for your benefit (and to save my fingers).

There'll be a board shot of each so you can see what you are getting.

So without further ado, I'll list the contenders and get straight into the thick of the action.

The dirty, err, two thirds dozen

• Albatron KX400-8XV
• AOpen AK77-400 Max
• DFI KT400A Lan Party
• EPoX 8K9A9I
• Gigabyte GA-7VAXP-A Ultra
• Jetway Polaris 400A
• MSI KT4A Ultra
• Soltek SL-KT400A-L

Each board implements most of the bare KT400A spec. All ship with 3 DDR DIMM slots for 3GB of DDR400 memory. All ship with an AGP8X slot for your graphics card and all ship with a handy Socket A socket for your CPU. All, unless my memory is hazy and without looking at my board notes, ship with onboard audio too. I'm sure Gigabyte would have thrown in a kitchen sink as well, if shipping costs wouldn't have been a bit expensive. Don't even mention the DFI.

Let's take them in alphabetical order to shrug off any talk of early favourites.