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

Final Words

There are a lot of positive and negative things we can say about the Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra. Let's first list the positives:

1. The Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra is fast. This is clearly due to the new KT400A North Bridge, with its revamped memory controller among other performance enhancements.
2. The Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra is feature-filled. With LAN, sound, USB 2.0, FireWire, and Serial ATA and IDE RAID, this motherboard is packed with just about everything an enthusiast desktop user could want. The features will get even better once 7VAXP-A Ultra motherboards start shipping with VT8237 South Bridges (which includes native Serial ATA support and 2 more USB 2.0 ports) in early May.

Now let's list some of the negative aspects of buying a Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra:

1. While the 7VAXP-A Ultra is fast, and certainly considerably faster than its KT400-based 7VAXP Ultra predecessor, it still lags a bit behind nForce2-powered motherboards. Even though VIA touts their "FastStream64" memory controller technology, the KT400A's single channel performance is still no better overall than nForce2's single channel performance. This is disappointing for two reasons:

a) VIA has had lots of time to develop this new chipset, and by the time KT400A motherboards like the 7VAXP-A Ultra are available in April it will have been a full 6 months after nForce2 motherboards arrived on the scene last October.

b) nForce2 motherboards are more mature, which is important for users that want to decide on a reliable motherboard as well as one that has been through the paces with end users, and not just hardware review web sites like AnandTech.

2. Looking at our first criticism above, you can see the 7VAXP-A Ultra and VIA KT400A motherboards in general already face an uphill battle against the current crop of nForce2 motherboards. What makes matters worse is the fact that, by the time 7VAXP-A Ultra boards are actually available this spring, there may already be new nForce2 motherboards arriving (or soon to be arriving) on the market with new Serial ATA South Bridges (MCP-S?) and who knows what else to thwart VIA KT400A boards. You will have to wait even longer for official 400MHz FSB support, as the Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra as well as any other KT400A motherboard will not officially support 400MHz FSB Athlon XP processors, (though there is a possibility that they will be able to with a future BIOS update according to one motherboard maker). However, there are already several nForce2 motherboards currently available that support these 400MHz FSB processors, and NVIDIA has assured us that nForce2 motherboards that don't yet support 400MHz FSB Athlon XP processors will support them with a future BIOS update anyway.

Despite tough competition from nForce2 motherboards by ASUS, Epox, ABIT and others, we still believe the Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra is a good buy. Performance wise, the lag in the 7VAXP-A Ultra's High-End Workstation scores versus dual channel nForce2 is quite large (in all 6 SPECviewperf scenarios dual channel nForce2 averages about a 10% lead over the 7VAXP-A Ultra); but besides the uncompetitive SPECviewperf scores, the 7VAXP-A Ultra is able to keep fairly close to dual and single channel nForce2 in gaming, office, and MPEG-4 encoding situations. In fact, in 4 out of 6 SPECviewperf scenarios the 7VAXP-A Ultra manages to outperform single channel nForce2. If you factor in the 7VAXP-A Ultra's price (which will be a few bucks lower than a similarly configured nForce2 motherboard), it just sweetens the deal.

Watch for more KT400A coverage in addition to new information regarding VIA's KT600 chipset coming soon. Stay tuned for Intel 865 and 875 and SiS 655FX coverage in the coming weeks.