The Test

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you should not base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

Click Here to learn about AnandTech's Motherboard Testing Methodology.

Test Configuration

Processor(s):
AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) 1GHz
RAM:
1 x 128MB Mushkin PC133 SDRAM
Hard Drive(s):
Western Digital 153BA Ultra ATA 66 7200 RPM
Bus Master Drivers:
VIA 4-in-1 v4.24 Service Pack
Video Card(s):
NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32MB DDR
Video Drivers:
NVIDIA Detonator 5.22
Operation System(s):
Windows 98 SE
Motherboard Revision:
ABIT KT7A-RAID Revision 1.0

 

Windows 98 Performance

Athlon 1GHz OEM
Sysmark 2000
Content Creation
Winstone 2000
Quake III Arena - 640 x 480 x 16
ABIT KT7A-RAID (KT133A/133MHz)
197
37.4
149.6
Microstar K7T Turbo (KT133A/133MHz)
194
37.5
145.7
Microstar K7T Pro2 (KT133/100MHz)
189
35.8
135.1

We compared the KT7A-RAID to another KT133A motherboard, the Microstar K7T Turbo (the review is in the works) and as you can see, this initial revision of the KT7A-RAID is just slightly faster than the K7T Turbo. With future BIOS revisions this could change but, as we're used to seeing, ABIT's tweaker-friendly BIOS usually gives it a small performance advantage in our tests.

We also compared the board to the winner of our latest KT133 Motherboard Roundup, the Microstar (MSI) K7T Pro2. This helps to illustrate the performance benefit simply switching to the 133MHz FSB gives you. We compared a 1GHz Athlon running at 1000/133 on the ABIT and MSI boards to a 1GHz Athlon running at 1000/100 on the K7T Pro2. As you can see, the numbers fall in line with what we saw in our VIA KT133A Review.

SYSMark 2000, not the most memory bandwidth intensive benchmark, shows a 5% increase in performance while Quake III Arena demonstrates a 10% performance difference. Considering that you can use your current CPU and PC133 SDRAM on all KT133A boards, these performance gains aren't bad at all.

The Bad Final Words & How it Rates
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