|
Bios
Looks
aren't the only thing one looks when buying a
motherboard. I must admit that I've been awed
by the excellent layout of the MSI board but what
about the bios?
MSI
has had some problems with regards to the bios
of their K7T Pro2 series of boards. And sadly,
the trend still continues in the K7T Turbo. For
starters, there aren't much options in the bios
for control of memory settings. You can set the
CAS latency, bank interleaving and auto/manual
memory setting. The first official bios releases
did have these options but 4-way memory interleaving
didn't work even when enabled in the bios. The
latest beta bios fixed this problem though. Once
you manually set memory settings, 4-way interleaving
is automatically turned off even if it is turned
on in the bios. To be able to use 4-way interleaving,
memory timings must be automatically set by the
board. It felt really odd since the options that
could manually bet set in the bios lose their
purpose. MSI really needs to work on the advanced
chipset features section of their bios.
Overclocking
also had a problem with the early bios releases.
Firstly, multiplier adjustment only worked for
multipliers higher than the default multiplier.
The beta bios however did fix this issue. More
voltage options were also added through the later
bios releases and this allows voltage adjustments
in 0.025v incriments. Front side bus speeds range
from 100-166 in 1MHz steps but a jumper is required
to set the fsb range from 100-132 of 133-166.
This could pose a problem to some chips that have
high default multipliers and run at 100MHz fsb.
Overclocking
and Stability
The
K7T Turbo didn't have any problems running the
Athlon C-type 1GHz at 1.33GHz. The board pretty
much maxed out around 148MHz fsb which is higher
than the Epox 8KTA3's 145MHz fsb. Having the 1MHz
incriments feature is definitely a good thing
since it will be able to help in squeezing the
most out of the cpu.
The
Test
With
that said, let's see how the K7T Turbo performs.
Tests were ran with 4-way memory interleaving
on and off on the K7T Turbo except for SysMark2000.
The K7T Turbo disables 4-way interleaving when
memory settings are manually set.
Test
System
AMD
Athlon 1000MHz C-type
MSI K7T Turbo AWARD(R) V1.0B16 Special BIOS
Epox 8KTA3 bios date 4/17/2001
128MB Kingston CAS2 PC133 SDRAM
Elsa Gladiac Ultra (250/460)
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! Value
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 7200RPM 20.4GB ATA100
HDD
Windows
98 SE
Detonator 11.01
DirectX8a
VIA 4-in-1 version 4.29
Benchmarks
Quake
III Arena demo001 v1.17
Fastest 640X480, Normal 800X600, High Quality
1024X768
MDK2 Trilinear Filtering, Max Texture Detail,
Hardware T&L
1024X768X16, 1024X768X32
3DMark2000 v1.1 Triple Buffer, 16-bit
Z-Buffer, Hardware T&L
640X480X16, 640X480X32, 1024X768X16, 1024X768X32
3DMark2001
1024X768X16, Triple Buffer, 16-bit Z-Buffer, Hardware
T&L, Compressed Textures
1024X768X32, Double Buffer, 24-bit Z-Buffer, Hardware
T&L, Compressed Textures
SysMark2000
SiSoft Sandra 2001 Memory Benchmark
3D Benchmarks
|
