Performance

The VIA KT133 chipset is certainly not new on the market, and we're pretty familiar with its' performance. With the AMD 760 chipset starting to filter into reviewers labs, we are beginning to see that the KT133 chipset is actually hindering the memory performance of AMD's latest CPU's. This means that every little bit of extra memory bandwidth which motherboard designers can tweak out of the chipset is excellent news. The K7VTA performs very well in our RAM bandwidth tests, considering the minor layout changes from other KT133 boards. Memory benchmarks consistently put the K7VTA 5% above AOpen's AK33 - which has been our best performing KT133 board to date. In the real world a 5% performance boost is one that users are going to see, not just a number that a benchmark spits out. Especially noticeable is extra RAM bandwidth in texture hungry applications like Quake 3.

The CPU benchmarks are actually a little surprising consider that the motherboard is giving the CPU an extra 5% memory bandwidth. The K7VTA performed slightly below both AOpen's AK33 and Azza's KT133BX board. It's not a substantial difference by any means. So small, in fact, that most users are very unlikely to notice, but nevertheless, the K7VTA is holding back our Duron 800 from its' full potential.

Synthetic benchmarks are excellent for determining minute performance differences, but just how many CPU Marks does it take to increase your gaming experience? As part of our routine motherboard testing suite, we use Quake 3 to try and establish real world performance rather relying on synthetic benchmarks alone. This is our first KT133 review using the ATI All-in-Wonder graphics card, so the framerates in the table below will be used as the reference points for future reviews.

	640X480	800X600	1024X768	1280X1024
Fast Quality	94.1	88	71.6	48
Normal Quality	93.3	87.8	71.4	47.9
High Quality	93.1	86.8	69	45.7

 

Stability and Overclocking