Gigabyte GA-7VAXP

Intel has being having a good time recently. Its Pentium 4 processors were treated to the first motherboard chipsets supporting DDR 400 memory and AGP 8x, and the latest 2.66GHz and 2.8GHz Pentium 4 CPUs have AMD's Athlon XP on the run. If you're currently an AMD user, you'd be forgiven for feeling anxious. Worry not, though, because Gigabyte and MSI are on hand to settle your nerves with two motherboards based around VIA's latest Apollo KT400 chipset. So if you fancy outfitting your Athlon with AGP 8x and DDR 400, look no further.

The new Apollo KT400 chipset supersedes the current KT333 chipset as VIA's flagship AMD platform. The KT400 north bridge controller is the most significant change, certainly from a performance perspective. Increasing bandwidth is the main aim here, with support for DDR 400 memory and AGP 8x, both of which should provide gains. It's worth pointing out, however, that not all DDR 400 memory modules will work correctly with KT400 and VIA currently recommends using validated DDR 333.

The KT400 chipset also adopts the recent VT8235 south bridge controller, as seen in VIA's P4X 400 chipset (see Reviews, issue 96, p118). This adds support for UltraATA/133 hard disks and USB 2 as standard.

To see how this new chipset stacks up against the competition, we tested two boards from Gigabyte and MSI. For performance testing, we added an Athlon XP 2200+ processor, 256MB of Apacer PC3200 memory, a 40GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV hard disk, a Creative GeForce4 Ti 4400 and installed Windows XP.

Of the two boards we tested, the Gigabyte offers the most features. These include a Promise PDC20276 UltraATA/133 RAID controller, a Realtek TRL8100BL Fast Ethernet controller and three IEEE-1394 ports via a backplate. Six-channel audio is also provided, courtesy of Realtek's ALC650 sound chip, and another backplate increases the total complement of USB 2 ports to six. Five PCI slots are left free for expansion.

MSI's KT4 Ultra, on the other hand, offers just the basics. There's no integrated LAN, RAID or IEEE-1394, although MSI does includes a D-Bracket for adding an extra two USB 2 ports. MSI also offers two other motherboards in the KT4 Ultra range - the KT4 Ultra-B and KT4 Ultra-BSR - which add additional features such as Bluetooth and Serial ATA.

Both boards are generally well laid out, particularly the GA-7VAXP. The only real qualm we had with the KT4 Ultra was with the placement of the power connector next to the CPU socket. This isn't a major problem, although it could mean difficult cable routing in some systems to stop the power supply wires obstructing the CPU cooler.

Initial performance testing of the GA-7VAXP using our 256MB stick of Apacer PC3200 memory produced a solid 2D benchmark score of 1.27. Gaming was equally good, with the Gigabyte scoring 7,804 in 3DMark2001 SE at 1,280 x 1,024 in 32-bit colour. Neither score is outstanding though, lagging behind 2.4GHz Pentium 4/Intel 845E combinations using the same hard disk and graphics card. Retesting using 512MB of PC2700 memory bumped the 2D score to a more respectable 1.30 and 3DMark2001 SE to 8,177.

It was a similar story with MSI's KT4 Ultra, scoring 1.28 in our 2D benchmarks using PC3200 memory. However, 3D performance was much improved, with the KT4 Ultra scoring 8,302 in 3DMark2001 SE at 1,280 x 1,024, making this a good board for gaming. But, as was the case with the GA-7VAXP, replacing the memory with 512MB of PC2700 produced better results - 1.30 in 2D and 8,372 in 3DMark2001 SE.