Late Vintage: High Degree of Maturity of the KT133

The Candidates In Detail

Acorp 7KTA

BIOS-Version: 27th October 2000

Board Revision: 1.09

The Taiwan manufacturer Acorp is making its debut at Tom's Hardware with the 7KTA. With a total of 1 ISA slot, 1 AMR slot and 5 PCI slots, the Acorp main board offers sufficient plug-in places. Unfortunately the connection cable for the two additional USB ports is missing. Due to the similarity in the board layout of the 7KTA with the 7KTM variant with onboard graphics, the second COM port can, additionally, only be used via a slot filter. Fortunately, this connection cable is included in the delivered items.

The 7KTA should, however, be of little interest to overclockers as the CPU system bus cannot be varied in 1 MHz steps. Other settings, such as CPU Vcore or DRAM voltage, are not possible, either. Nevertheless, the processor bus clock can be adjusted from 100 to 132 MHz. The memory clock can only be adjusted between 100 and 133 MHz. An advantage, on the other hand, is the built-in temperature sensor in the CPU socket. Hence, the current condition can be read at any time and overheating can be prevented. Acorp, however, cuts unnecessary corners by using the 686A chip set in the storage area. Although the KT133 has no problems coping with 1.5 GBytes, the storage expansion with the 7KTA is restricted to a maximum of 768 MBytes.