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| Quality and Setup of the Acorp 7KT266A Motherboard |
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So similar yet so different... |
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The overall layout of the 7KT266A was well thought out with little issues to report. This model came equipped with 1 ACR, 1 AGP and 5 PCI slots, allowing for ample expandability. Although we doubt that too many enthusiasts would have much use for an ACR slot, some commercial end-users will be able to take advantage of it. Fortunately, the placement of the ACR slot is good in relation to the AGP slot. In most cases, when a quality video card is installed, the 1st PCI slot is rendered inaccessible due to IRQ sharing with the AGP slot. The way the 7KT266A is designed, you probably wouldn't miss it anyway since it is doubtful the average user would have a need for ACR compatibility. With the AGP slot, we would have liked to see some form of retention clip or lever for the video card to keep it securely in place. The North bridge comes with a heat sink mounted with simple thermal tape, of course we would prefer to see a fan mounted here with the use of a high-quality thermal epoxy, but the current design is adequate. 3 DIMM Slots are provided with a maximum capacity of 3GB of DDR-RAM, more than enough room for expansion.
Acorp did yield a little surprise for us that we are not used to seeing in the HH labs. The 7KT266A comes with the capacity to add "Smart LED" functionality to the system. What is that you ask? A "Smart LED" is an extension component that allows the status of the BIOS to be displayed on a small display mounted on the systems case. Although this may only appeal to the commercial user, the information displayed can be quite useful in monitoring the systems critical temperature, voltages and other key settings without the need for a third party utility. This would be a great advantage for the hardcore over clocker, however, we still need to determine if the 7KT266A is a good over clocking board yet. So let's take a look at the BIOS and then we'll started seeing what we can with this board.
The BIOS of the Acorp 7KT266A:
The 7KT266A motherboard comes equipped with the popular Award 6.0 BIOS. Aside from decent memory adjustments and PC Health Status, this version was rather ordinary. There is the ability to do some over clocking but only by adjusting the BUS-Speed, neither the BIOS nor the board itself had any multiplier adjustments available. Although the system functioned properly, we did find one thing curious. When we first attempted to over clock the board and experienced errors from going too high, we went back into the Frequency/Voltage screen to reduce the Bus-speed. What we found was that a voltage setting appeared that we thought was previously not there. We didn't think much of it but the next time we rebooted and went into the BIOS, the voltage adjustment was no longer available.
Next we went to the website and downloaded the latest available BIOS for the board and once again we saw the setting appear and disappear several different times during testing. This was a peculiar problem that we hope will be cleared up in future BIOS updates. We were slightly disappointed with this since we feel that it may have made a difference in this boards over clock ability. With that said, let's move on to the over clocking of the 7KT266A motherboard. Overclocking and Sandra 2002
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