ABIT KD7-RAID - ABIT KD7-RAID

ABIT KD7-RAID Motherboard Review

Benchmarks:

What would a motherboard be without benchmarks to give ya an idea of what the board is capable of?  We're not gonna get crazy with number here, we just wanna give you a rough idea of what you can expect from the board.  I will tell you upfront that these are synthetic benchmarks and should be taken as exactly that. 

Test System:

• ABIT KD7-RAID Motherboard

• AMD AthlonXP 2600+ (333FSB)

• 256MB Xtreme DDR PC3500

• Maxtor 80GB Hard Drive

• Albatron 128MB GeForce4 Ti4200 Turbo

SiSoft Sandra 2003 CPU Benchmarks:

We'll start with the basic SiSoft CPU scores to see how well the KT400 can handle the instructions and get the goods from that AthlonXP..  :)

Here we can see we're getting almost to a tee what we'd expect from this system and configuration, nothing great, nothing bad.  Realistically speaking of the benchmarks we'll be looking at these are the most irrelevant when it comes to gauging motherboard performance, but I wanted to throw them out there.

SiSoft Sandra 2003 Memory Benchmarks:

Here again we see the KT400 delivering right in line with the other chipsets running like memory speeds.  We specifically chose DDR2700 modules to compare this with as we are running our system at the default 166Mhz front side bus.

SiSoft Sandra 2003 Network/Lan Benchmark:

Network performance on a motherboard review?  Well.. Yes.  Since ABIT included an onboard NIC we felt it was appropriate in this case.  The 100mb NIC included in this KD7 seems to perform right inline, actually a tad better, than SiSoft's 100mb NIC for comparison purposes.

Audio Winbench 99 Benchmark:

This is a benchmark I always like to see.  The biggest disadvantage to running onboard components is that they rely on your system CPU to carry out their instructions.  Here is where we find out if the money and convenience saved by running onboard audio is worth it. Audio Winbench in this instance is not going to tell you how it sounds, but how hard it works your CPU.  You'll see below that it runs several frequency tests and bit qualities, at the same time monitoring it's system draw.

Oddly these numbers are lower than what I expected.  Compared to what I am used to seeing with my Philips Acoustic Edge sound card all of these numbers were better than my Edge.  I reran this 4 times before I just accepted them as fact.  Either the onboard audio chip included with this KD7 absolutely rocks, or it's time for a new sound card in my main box! :)  There's no way around it, for an onboard audio chipset these scores are excellent.

On to the last page to see more benchmark results, Overlclocking, and the conclusion...

Next: ABIT KD7-RAID >>
 

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