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| ABIT KV7 vs, AOpen AK77-600 MAX A Matter of CODEC | |
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Review by Michael Thomson, January 19, 2004 Edited and Photography by MS |
| ABIT KV7 At: | |
| AOpen AK77-600 At: |
Summary
Arguably, VIA's KT600 is not the hottest thing in town, for whatever reason, none of the production boards has lived up to the expectations spawned by the reference design boards. This does not preclude the boards in question from being rather solid performers with a certain degree of inherited maturity and, therefore, KT600 boards do constitute a viable alternative for many IT departments or else the DYI user who does not need the latest crown of the hardware creation.
Positioned in a price range starting at about US$ 60, the KT600 boards further offer inexpensive integration of multimedia capabilities, with on-board audio and ethernet, what else is there that one might look for at that price. Granted, you get what you pay for, but how much is $60.- worth nowadays in terms of hardware? We have two examples, that is the ABIT KV7 and the AOpen AK77-600 Max, two boards with altogether different strategies to look at.
"Welcome to the Fast Lane" vs. "Virtuoso"
Most initial releases of any chipset or platform face some problems whereas evolutionary approaches tend to be safer, albeit at the cost of carrying all the legacy of unnecessary features and patched patches with them. The result is that any newly "from scratch" designed solution has a lot more potential for performance but also often enough runs into quirks. Building on the proven with some trade-off in terms of performance appears, therefore the main justification for pursuing a dedicated line of VIA chipset boards centering around the VIA KT600 chipset. Not everybody needs the latest and fastest, the bread and butter boards, the sheer volume only needs some features and as little as possible problems with stability and reliability and this is where a design proven over 2 millennia can come in handy.
From VIA's standpoint, the situation is also quite understandable, there is no real incentive to throw a ton of money into a completely new development for a platform with an already announced "end of life" tag. In other words, the strategy is to revamp the North Bridge to enable 400 MHz bus and memory frequency, slap some bridge silicon on the parallel ATA controller to justify it as Serial solution and sell the combo at an attractive price point. After all, there is enough performance available anyway for most users that don't need the ultimate in every respect. More important is level of integration, what other add-on cards are needed and how much expandability is there.
Of particular interest is further the quality of any integrated audio solution. Offerings in the past have often been nothing short of horrible with scratching and hissing noises as predominant feature or substitute for even remotely acceptable audio quality. Over the last 2 years, this neglected area has changed dramatically but how much better are the new solutions?
Amongst the more renowned manufacturers in the scene are ABIT and AOpen with the first admittedly targeting the enthusiast segment, while the latter is shooting more for the broad clientele of system integrators. Both manufacturers have their own version of the KT600-based boards, the ABIT AK7 and the AOpen AK-77 600 MAX.
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