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KT400A vs nForce2 vs SiS746

Motherboards/AMD S462 by piotke @ 2003-05-15

A couple of months ago nVidia introduced the nForce? chipset for AMD. It outperformed VIA?s KT400 chipset by a considerably margin. Now VIA introduced a newer version, the KT400A. Is it a decent alternative for the Nforce?? And what about Sis ? They have the Sis 746 that boasts 200Mhz FSB. I compared three motherboards based on these chipsets, and of course, overclocked them. Tested motherboards: Abit NF7-S v2.0 (nForce2) , DFI Lanparty (KT400A) and the ECS L7S7A2L (SiS746)

HD Tach & SiSoft Sandra

HD Tach 2.61

A non-overclocking related benchmark was the IDE controller test. I used HD-tach for that.

Madshrimps (c)

As you can see the DFI needs more CPU power while using the IDE controller. But RichBa5tard told me that it's known that the IDE controllers made by VIA aren't optimal. So the larger CPU usage has nothing to do whether the board is overloaded with extras, like I first thought.

SiSoft Sandra
Memory bandwidth benchmarks.

In the first two tests I used the same memory timings for all three boards. But during the last test I tried to get the maximum 100% stable power out of the board.

These were the results:

FSB: 133 / Memory speed: 200

Madshrimps (c)

FSB: 166 / Memory speed: 200

Madshrimps (c)

Maximum

Madshrimps (c)

As you can see, the Abit is noticeably faster.
Now, this benchmark was to test the bandwidth only. But does that mean anything?

Lets run the short SuperPi "benchmark"

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