by Dean Barker  (2/18/2003)
 

Introduction

The KT400 mainboards have been out for a while now and initially were a disappointment to many.  Hearing KT400, made us all drool over the unofficial official support for DDR400 and how this was going to make champagne fall from the heavens.  Unfortunately, this isn't what happened.  Many of us were shocked to see that this new generation of mainboards didn't offer any more juice at DDR400 settings than DDR333.  As a matter of fact often times less.

There is more to the KT400 than just DDR400.  The inclusion of AGP 8x support and VIA's new V-Link that doubles the connection speed between the Northbridge and Southbridge from 266 mbps to a speedy 533 mbps.  The Southbridge keeps things in hand with three USB 2.0 controllers offering up to six USB 2.0 ports.  ATA133, 10/100 Ethernet, and six channel 5.1 quality sound are enough to keep most anyone happy.

In this roundup we plan on giving you a moderate run though hitting the high points on each board before we get down to business.  The players today are ABIT's KD7-G, AOpen's AK77 8X Max, ASUS's A7V8X, EPoX's 8K9A, and last but not least the Tyan Trinity S2495.  Keeping in mind that no one board is going to be able to squeeze much more from the KT400 chipset than the next we are rating these boards from a standpoint of performance, price, features, manuals, and layout.  On with the show.

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