Nathan Davis warns 'May the Force fear the return of VIA.'
Gigabyte is a company well known for offering some of the best high-end range of motherboards at a reasonable money cost factor. This is also the case with their lower-end boards -- still packed with features but not twinned with an appropriately premium price, instead opting for ridiculously cheap. That works for us.
Aimed at the middle range of the market and taking over from the success of the KT400A, is their first board sporting VIA's brand new 400MHz FSB supportive KT600 chipset - the GA-7VT600 1394. In fact, Gigabyte is the very first manufacturer to hit the market with this brand spanking new chipset, and ties in perfectly with the now available 400MHz FSB Barton-cored Athlon 3200+.
This budget board continues the trajectory of Gigabyte's legacy, again adding even more features and functionality than thought possible on a budget board. Basically, this is one humdinger of a board. It supports up to 3GB of DDR400 RAM and the memory options in the BIOS are like most top of the range Gigabyte boards, with extremely configurable latencies and many other tweaky bits you may have fancies for.
Being a KT600 board, this is actually the first VIA board to support integrated Serial ATA. There are two SATA ports included and will have you ready for some hot swapping hard drive action and there's also FireWire support (via a back plate). Then of course all the usual extras like an onboard 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port, 'Dual BIOS' (one screws up, the other begins The Fixening), AGP 8x slot, six USB2.0/1.1 ports and onboard six-channel AC'97 audio. There are of course two standard ATA133 IDE channels.
The 'Smart Fan' ability is a natty addition. This automatically changes the speed of the CPU and Northbridge fans depending on how high the temperatures are flying. Though realistically, the fans won't be slowing down too often with a hot and feisty AMD processor installed.
Well, let's see how the KT600 chipset stacks up against the nForce2. To assure you there's nothing tricky going on behind the scenes (the butt monkeys are after you, conspiracist!), we pitted this against another Gigabyte board, the 7NNXP Ultra with the nForce2 chipset. This mobo is aimed at the performance demanding tweakers out there. The common bits we used were an Athlon 3200+ (2.2GHz), two sticks of DDR400 and a 128MB GeForce FX 5200.
The nForce2 can keep its pants on for now, but it's up against some aggressive rivalry. Just look at the results -- absolutely astounding for a far cheaper board. The KT600 came in just a tad under the nForce2 by nine points in SysMark 2002, and hardly anything at all in the game tests. Forgive me -- by all three frames in Quake 3: Arena and a mind boggling one-sixteenth of a frame in Unreal Tournament 2003 (obviously we didn't print that). With the nForce2 board sporting more features, like onboard RAID and gigabit Ethernet, it's still marvellous considering the price difference (the 7NNXP Ultra is approximately $400, though many standard nForce2 boards are around the $200 mark). The 7NNXP does support Dual Channel DDR, but the results merely confirm what was noted in the Head-to-Head last month. Dual Channel will do a heap of nothing for AMD chips unless you're creating lots of I/O traffic. Like a drunk fighting off evil gerbils.
The GA-7VT600 1394 is undeniably the supreme cream of the crop in the mid-range market. It's in no way revolutionary, but it's great to see VIA back up there with a competitive weapon, after six long months of bland performance. When you put into consideration its price and target audience, this delight of capacitor-filled heat-producing goodness will satisfy the mothering needs.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012