Thursday, April 12, 2001

Introduction

A little while ago, Azza sent us their newest board - the KT3ABX - which stands nearly identical to it's predecessor, save for the fact that employs the more recent VIA KT133A chipset. As always, Azza's target market lies towards the entry level, but that's never stopped them from offering features that measure-up quite well, even to it's more expensive competitors.

Let's take a look.

Configuration

The Azza KT3ABX is gifted with a totally Jumperless design; save for a single jumper labeled JP8, which can be used to force the FSB to 100MHz or 133MHz.

The rest of the KT3ABX's functionality is accessed from within the BIOS. Before anyone gets too excited though, don't expect a wide breadth of sophisticated Overclocking functions. For the most part, the only feature of interest to Overclockers will lie within the "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu, from where it's possible to set the FSB to a frequency ranging from 100MHz to 166MHz in 1Mhz increment.

The memory bus can also be set - from within the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu - to operate at either 100MHz or 133MHz.

Unfortunately, no options are provided that would allow users to adjust the Vcore or Vio voltages, or the CPU'c clock multiplier setting.

That said, the BIOS can be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by pressing "CTRL + Insert" at start-up. This is particularly useful if the system refuses to boot after a particularly aggressive set of tweaks.

Next: Technical details.