Wednesday, January 10, 2001

Introduction

Some manufacturers just deserve better recognition. This is certainly the case with Azza, a young enterprise that entered into the world of motherboard design & manufacturing 11 years ago, and which virtually emanates a vigorous desire to produce the best products on the market. Which, of course, brings us to the Azza KT133BX - a Socket A motherboard based on the KT133 chipset, complete with the recently released VT2C686B Southbridge. The aspect the most obviously leaps to all users' attention though, is the uncommonly generous software bundle that accompanies the KT133BX; a bundle which is composed of no less than 4 CDs. It certainly got our attention. In fact, let's say we skip the formalities, and move on the review itself.

Features

To begin, we have to say that we were surprised to see that Azza's latest offering stands out as an example to all other manufacturers in the area of BIOS design; here, they've clearly opted to offer the greatest amount of flexibility possible. For example, the FSB frequency is adjustable in 1MHz steps from 100MHz to 132MHz. Unfortunately, Azza doesn't seem to have gotten the hang of everything just yet, as they seemed to have omitted BIOS options permitting for the adjustment of the Vcore voltage, or the clock multiplier; this, though, is likely only a temporary state of affairs in our opinion.

Adjustment of the memory bus is available from within the "Chipset Features Setup" menu, as is the case with most motherboards these days.

In fact, upon investigation of the board itself, it becomes clear that we're faced with a truly jumperless design; not a single jumper present relates in the slightest to the configuration of the CPU.

Unlike Azza's PB815TX, however, the KT133BX lacks an AIR Bus - a key feature of the former that allows for the addition of a KeyBIOS. By inserting such a KeyBIOS, it would have been possible to immediately reset the BIOS, or to restrict access to it.

Technical details

Some space has been left around the CPU socket - just enough to allow for the installation of medium-sized heatsinks.

The memory slots are located so close to the AGP port that it is possible for the memory retention clips to come into contact with the graphics card while installing/uninstalling the memory modules.

Eleven 2200Mfd capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The CPU locking lever is made of metal.

Only 2 fan connectors are included.

Hardware monitoring (optional) is controlled by a Winbond W83783S circuit.

Manual assignment of IRQs is not possible

Next: Additional features.