Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra: The KT400A in Retail Action

Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra: Stress Testing

We were able to test this motherboard in several different areas and configurations, including:

1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing was conducted by running the FSB at 193MHz.
2. Memory stress testing was conducted by running RAM at 333MHz and 400MHz with as many modules populated as possible at the most aggressive timings possible.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results

At 193MHz FSB we did not encounter any reliability issues with the Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra. At this speed we were able to run 24 hours of Prime95 torture tests without a single failure. We reran our gaming suite (Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena, Jedi Knight II) in addition to data compression and Word and Excel apps while Prime95 torture tests were running in the background. We also found some time to run SPECviewperf and XMPEG to put even more stress on the 7VAXP-A Ultra, but in the end we could not faze this motherboard.

Memory Stress Test Results

While VIA claims full support for DDR400 memory speeds with KT400A motherboards, you'll find out that this isn't exactly accurate. First, we will test the KT400A-based Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra at a memory speed of 166MHz. We'll do this by installing three Corsair XMS memory modules running at 333MHz DDR. Here were the timings we were able to achieve:

These are exactly the type of timings we love to see at DDR333 speeds. In fact, these are the lowest timings available in the 7VAXP-A Ultra's BIOS. Users that want to tweak their system to the max but don't want to overclock or anything else fancy like that will be delighted to learn that installing three memory modules running at 333MHz at these timings is hardly an issue for the 7VAXP-A Ultra. However, it doesn't get much better than this going forward…

The following chart lists the highest frequency we were able to reach at the same memory timings listed in the DDR333 stress tests above, with all memory banks occupied. Here are our results:

We were able to operate the 7VAXP-A Ultra reliably at these timings at DDR400. Unfortunately we had to disable 4-way bank interleave and relax Precharge to Active/Active to CMD timings to 3T, all of which lowered performance a bit in a few games, but overall it's good to see that this motherboard is at least capable of 400MHz DDR memory speeds with three modules installed.

As usual, we ran several memory stress tests and general apps to make sure all these timings were stable. We started off by running Prime95 torture tests; a grand total of 24 hours of Prime95 was successfully run at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran Sciencemark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. After all was said and done, the 7VAXP-A Ultra was able to withstand each of these memory stress tests.