L O S T C I R C U I T S

Overclocking

Using a budget board doesn't and shouldn't prevent anyone from overclocking, however, keep in mind that the KM133 chipset is a variation of the KT133 with all inherent limitations in FSB variability. In addition, the ProSavage2000 graphics controller showed its aversion against raising the FSB above 107 MHz by losing different color channels. That is, at 109 MHz, the red channel was lost, therefore, even the DOS prompt came up in blue-on-black instead of B/W. At 110 MHz FSB, this reversed, in that the blue channel was lost, adding a canary-yellow hue to the video-output in all applications.

Effectively, even though there were no instabilities noted, this limits the useable spectrum of FSB options to 100-107 MHz, another reason why any performance-oriented user may not be too happy with the board.

The situation is not much more appealing when a standard AGP card is added. Even though the system booted reliably into Windows98 at 107 MHz FSB, benchmarks like Expendable would simply quit at that speed. At 105 MHz the system was running semi-stable, that is, with occasional spontaneous reboots or else, in Expendable Timedemo, conjuring up the usual slaughterhouse that happens when errors in the memory transfer occur.

In general, there is relatively little performance difference between the KM133 and the KT 133 chipset as long as the graphics subsystem is not challenged with 3D applications. Scores of 188 and 197 in Sysmark (100 and 107 MHz, respectively) are marginally lower than what can be achieved on KT133 boards but, quite honest, in most business applications, a few percent more or less really don't matter.

It does get interesting, though, when looking at 3D applications. As shown almost one year ago on Inqst, the KM133 chipset with the ProSavage2000 engine does have its merits, at least in a direct comparison with the integrated Intel i752 controller found in the i810 and i815(E) chipsets. Compared to any real AGP interface, the focus is reversed to ask not how good but how bad is it really?

One thing is certain, it is not great. However, it is not too bad either. Here are a few examples:

Expendable Timedemo

Expendable frame rates at 1 GHz. As reference, average fps are given of an Intel i815 chipset board using the integrated graphics as well as a Socket7 board (Shuttle HOT603, K6-3 at 450 MHz, Diamond Monster Fusion). With DIMM interleaving disabled, the KM133 chipset still manages to pull 48.4 fps which climbs to a soaring 52.8 fps if interleaving (I) is forced. Interestingly, there was no difference whether the onboard sound was enabled or disabled, clearly pointing the finger to the graphics controller and the UMA architecture as the system bottleneck

How much performance can be gained using a standard AGP card?

Running the MSI 8809 Phantom instead of the integrated graphics, with AC97 sound enabled gave some pretty respectable frame rates that, by no means fall behind those achieved by a standard KT133-based board. Bank interleaving (I), once again, resulted in a healthy performance increase. Disabling the onboard sound yielded another "skyrocketing" performance increase. In fact, the A7VI-VM is faster than quite a few KT133-based boards in this case.

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