Socket-A VIA KT133 Motherboard Roundup - November 2000

General Expectations

When you are dealing with the first generation of a product, most of the time you just live with what’s out there.  But when the second generation of the product comes around, expectations rise.  The same holds true for this, the second wave of KT133 motherboards.

When we looked at the boards during the first roundup, most of them were just plain implementations of the KT133 chipset.  Most of the manufacturers tried to put in some extra FSB settings, but that was almost all users could hope for.  The three black sheep back then were ABIT, ASUS and QDI, all of which offered clock multiplier adjustment for the overclocking of Socket-A CPUs.

Things have definitely changed with the second-generation KT133 motherboards.  Implementation of multiplier control is now an expected feature.  Motherboards that lack this functionality are almost immediately dismissed as having a lack of features.  The same case for FSB speeds, users expect to have wide range of FSB settings available.  For hardware enthusiasts, the ability to tweak core and I/O voltages is a must-have as well.  All these features combined are mainly aimed at the overclocking community, obviously, because of their nature.

Besides overclocking, users can expect the new KT133 motherboards to have better stability and performance as well.  For stability, since manufacturers have had more time to work on the board layout, surface mount, as well as the choice of capacitors, we have noticed an increase in the general stability.  The same case exists for the performance of these new boards.  Manufacturers took the time to adopt a better layout, as well as the incorporation of updated BIOSes that can lead to increased performance as well.

Feature wise, probably the most noticeable improvement is the inclusion of an extra IDE controller, whether it is simply to add ATA/100 support or to bring IDE RAID functionality.

Another important step, as we mentioned earlier, is the migration to the VIA 686B South Bridge which removes the need to rely on a 3^rd party controller for ATA/100 support.  There are some other features users can start to expect from manufacturers also, like overclocking and BIOS update utilities under Windows, diagnostic LED or a voice control troubleshooting mechanism, etc…  These features might not be perfect for everyone, but they are definitely useful for beginners.

Now with all these expectations in mind, we can start going through those twelve motherboards compared here and see how many meet today’s expectations.