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Chaintech 7VJL Apogee KT333


Date
: 09/23/02 – 01:58:41 AM

Author
:

Category
: Motherboard

Page 1 : Index

Manufacturer: Chaintech
Price: $120

Introduction

A few weeks ago I was presented the opportunity to make a few upgrades to my system. My best friend had just bit on this board and after seeing everything in-person I was drooling to get one myself. So that's what I did – I went to Newegg and purchased the replacement to my gaming rig's ECS K7S5A that I had put in there while at the University of Cincinnati spring quarter.

What made me pick this board? Easily one of the largest factors was the chipset. I chose this board because it was based on the KT333CE so it'd be a shoe in to run the next chips AMD releases that use a higher FSB if they went that route. Also this board appealed because it had some things available that you'd be hard pressed to find in other boards, let alone for under $120!

To give you a little taste of what to expect from this review, you can expect a good solid look at a newly released board that is looking to hold it's own against the coming KT400's. That is my goal for you all today – to give you an honest look at the Chaintech 7VJL Apogee.

So, how bout we get this thing rolling, shall we?

Page 2 : Specifications

Specifications

Now upon my visit to Chaintech's web site I was able to gank the extensive list of features of this board direct from its maker. ;) So here they are:

-Hardware CPU :
AMD Socket A

-System :
Frequency FSB 200/266 MHz

-Chipset :
VIA KT333 + VT8235

-Memory :
(3) DDR SDRAM DIMMs (3GB)

-Physical Form Factor ATX

Dimensions 305mm x 230mm

-Expansion

One Universal-AGP slot for both 2X/4XAGP (v2.0 compliant)
Six 32-Bit PCI slots (v2.2 compliant)

-AV Subsystems

Video 4XAGP
Audio CMedia 8738 6ch / Optional AC'97 Codec

-CPU

Supports AMD Socket A Duron/Athlon/XP CPU
System clock supports 200/266 MHz

-Chipset

VIA KT333 + VT8235

-Main Memory

Three 184 pin DDR DIMMs up to 3GB
Supports PC1600/2100/2700 DDR SDRAM modules

-Audio Subsystem

Full-duplex operation for simultaneous recording and playback
6 Channel speaker audio supports
Embedded 32OHM 5w earphone amplifier
Supports MIDI and dual game ports
32 Voice HRTF 3D positional audio, CRL 3D supports MS Direct
Sound3D, Aureal A3D and Creative EAX APIs
Support SPDIF (optional)

-UltraDMA IDE Ports

Supports two IDE ports up to 4 ATAPI devices
Supports PIO Mode 4 up to 16.6MBps, Multi Mode 4 up to
66MBps, Multi Word Mode 5 up to 100MBps and Multi Word Mode
6 up to 133MBps with Bus Mastering
Bus-Mastering software drivers for all common multi-tasking
operating systems

-Embedded USB Controller

Embedded USB1.1/2.0 Controller
Three EHCI USB 2.0 Controller support total 6 USB 2.0/1.1 Ports
Support USB 2.0 High-Speed Device @480 Mb/s Transfer Rates

-On Board Super I/O Controller

Two UARTs support serial ports and IR function (up to
115.2Kbps) for HPSIR and ASKIR
One SPP/ECP/EPP parallel port One floppy disk drive connector supports up to 2.88MB
Integrates smart card reader function and interface, to be qualified for meeting PC/SC standard

-Embedded System Monitoring

8 external voltage inputs
2 temperature sensing for CPU and system
2 Fan speed (CPU and system) monitoring with on/off control in
suspend

-Boot-Block Flash ROM Award system BIOS
support PnP, APM, DMI, ACPI, & Multi-device
booting features

[b]-Software Bundle

Software Driver CD (Chipset Autodetect)
Value Pack 2002
Thiz Linux 6.0
APOGEE Overclocking

-Other Feature

Three 3×1 pin fan connector
Two 5×2 pin USB connectors for front side 4 USB ports
6×1 pin Infrared connector
3×1 pin wake on LAN connector with housing
3×1 pin wake on Modem connector with housing
4×1 pin CD-in connector with 2.54mm pitch housing
4×1 pin Aux-in connector with 2mm pitch housing
4×1 pin Mono-in connector with 2mm pitch housing
5×2 pin SPDIF connector (optional)
4×2 pin woofer/center connector for 6 channel audio
5×2 pin front side audio connector
9×2 pin front panel connector
17×2 pin floppy connector

As you can see from the specs this board comes with a pretty impressive feature list. What they fail to mention in that list, believe it or not, is they include rounded cables (yellow to match) and the very nice CBox which brings four more USB 2.0 connectors to the front of your rig and even a headphone jack and mic jack. Good stuff! Included in the goodies you see is also a drivers disk, applications disk, a copy of Thiz Linux, and a set of headphones to take advantage of the onboard 6 channel audio. So far so good. Now lets move on and take a look at the board itself…

Page 3 : Layout

Layout

The layout of a motherboard can play a major role in how many headaches you will have when setting up. It's a good thing to take into account especially if you have a tight mid-tower that the board is going into. Not only will the layout have an effect on the ease of set-up, but it will also have an effect on your final airflow. Example: Having used upwards of eight ECS K7S5A's you will eventually notice that the power connector for the motherboard isn't in the best of spots. The cord tends to dangle over top of your cpu's fan and it just gets in the way :P Now, having pointed this out I found that the 7VJL does a great job at eliminating most of the clutter. Not only do they place the power connector away from the cpu but they have also moved that pesky floppy connector on the far end of the board eliminating some slack along with keeping it away from the IDE connectors. Chaintech has also gone the mile and provided rounded cables which make for an even better airflow and even less clutter. Personally I think the layout of this motherboard is a definite win. It comes with six PCI slots, three DIMM slots, and has sufficient room around the socket for most coolers.

Now that you see the board you may very well notice something amiss – no active cooling. For most of you this will easily be corrected and can even be taken further by adding thermal paste in-between the sink and northbridge. It's a bit odd, but Chaintech does realize this and includes a blister pack with the package for those that just have to have it (me). Here's my Artic Silver applied to that chip:

Looking closer at the board you may or may not notice one big difference on the 7VJL, larger jumpers. Chaintech has a small amount of jumpers on the board but luckily they have extended their length to make them easier to grab on to and adjust. Jumpers on this board are used for keyboard/usb power on, fsb settings (100,133,166), CMOS (of course!), and onboard audio. For the most part those are the jumpers that you'll have use for, but be weary because there are some misprints that others have picked up in the manual such as the onboard audio's jumper settings are fumbled up a bit in the manual. All in all though I think that the board has a lot to show for it.

Here you can see what sets this board apart from many of the other KT333 boards out currently. This board comes with the new VIA southbridge that supports USB 2.0, ATA 133, and blow up dolls! Okay, maybe not blow up dolls, but you get the point, Chaintech decided to sit out round one of the game to be one of the first out with these features on a KT333 board due to the new VIA 8235 southbridge. Kudos to Chaintech as I think they made an excellent choice. Also Chaintech has chosen to use CMedia's onboard sound that provides 4.1 -channel audio and bundles with it a pair of headphones they label "Body Theater". Combining the headphones provided and CMedia's XeaR technology it produces a quality surround sound effect that has to be heard to be appreciated. Now lets move on to booting this guy up and checking out the bios.

Page 4 : BIOS

Bios

Before you can even make it to the bios you must first boot, correct? Well, this was the only point that the 7VJL started to be a bit of a pain. I think I got a bad apple because my board loves to give me poop when ever the video card is jarred in any way (my buddies board did NOT have this problem). This gave me some grief till I figured that out and then I moved onto another problem which occurred while trying to load windows. Okay, no big deal so I did a fresh install. After the fresh install and reading about some other occurrences on forums I was up and running. So all in all this board gave me a few headaches but nothing that couldn't be overcome.

Looking into the systems bios you will find much of everything you could want as an overclocker. You are able to adjust memory voltages, chipset voltages, agp voltages, cpu voltages, and cpu multiplier. Max volts you can get for your RAM is 2.95 volts while it's max setting for the CPU is a nice 2 volts. Great great, but one thing to understand is that with this board you only get the 1/5 PCI & AGP timing when you set the jumper to 166 FSB. What this means is you have to have a processor that can boot at it's default multiplier AND still run at 166 FSB. I unfortunately didn't have the ability and my TBird I use is now locked :/ Don't know why because it served me well for a good long time unlocked and even through taking some chips on it's core, but now after careful cleaning and try after try she won't budge that multiplier. Thus, because of this unfortunate situation for myself I was not able to provide much for overclocking ventures. And opted to borrow one that was still locked, but better for comparisons.

Chaintech has provide the ability to disable the onboard components by bios. Another thing they have in the onboard selection is the ability to set the CMedia chip to 4-channel or 6-channel. I let this onboard audio replace my Live! 5.1 card because it is that good. The CMedia chip provides A3D, EAX, and Direct Sound 3D support and does a great job providing quality sound that doesn't snap, crackle, or pop.

Overall this is definitely one of the best bios I have come across and for being my first time with Chaintech I must say I am impressed. It's only gotten better – I first started with Abit, then moved to Gigabyte, then ECS *cough* not for overclocking, and now to Chaintech. This is good stuff I tell ya! ;) Now on to some benchmarks, shall we?

Page 5 : Overclocking

Overclocking

The overclocking ventures were quite short on this board. I had big plans to see just how far I could push the fsb of this board prior to receiving it, but it seems my fab unlocked TBird has pooped on me and won't budge it's multiplier – even after extensive cleaning of the chip. Could have something to do with it's chipped core on one whole edge, but hey, it still functions 100% (or nearly minus the multiplier adjustment). Thus, having said that I was only able to raise the FSB to a not so spectacular 145 with a boot into windows on this processor.

However I did have chance to review this board using a XP 1700+ speed processor. The thing that hurts is that the board uses a FSB/divider jumper, and unless you have a processor that can handle a 166 front side bus out of the box or have an unlocked chip to play with you won't be pushing your front side bus high at all. I was able to overclock to a 148 FSB (x11.5) and 1.85 Vcore on air cooling. This translated into nearly XP 2100+ speed at 1.702ghz. The Hercules FDX 8500LE couldn't handle anything more than 148FSB without freezing up running 3DMark 2001SE. Thus one thing that would be nice is the ability to choose your divider regardless of your FSB being 100/133/166.

Now, if you're not a fan of using the bios to overclock the Apogee Overclocking Utility is also available from their website and as this is the first time I have even looked at such a utility (never touched my Gigabyte's, I prefer jumpers and bios) I was impressed with it's look and functionality. Good way to get your feet wet if you're too intimidated by opening up your machine often or fiddling in your bios.

Now onto the benchmarks!

Page 6 : Benchmarking

Benchmarking

The most eager part about getting a new board is seeing how well it performs, so on with it!

The test system:

- Chaintech 7VJL Apogee motherboard
- AMD Athlon XP 1700+ CPU
- Hercules FDX 8500LE vid card (265.5/252)
- Crucial 256MB DDR PC2100 memory
- Maxtor 60GB 7200RPM ATA100 hard drive
- Windows XP Professional + Latest Drivers

Quake 3 Arena

Demo 001

Torture Demo

MadOnion's 3D Mark 2001SE

16-BIT

32-BIT

SiSoft Sandra Memory Benchmark

Page 7 : Conclusion

Conclusion

Good

- Price
- KT333CE
- USB2.0
- Onboard LAN and Sound
- Voltage Selection and Tweaks
- Rounded Cables
- Headphones
- CBox
- Stable

Bad

- No automatic divider adjustment

I have to say that Chaintech and their 7VJL Apogee motherboard is a top notch KT333 board. This board features onboard LAN, 6-channel sound, … and more! The board doesn't cater 100% to overclockers, but if you have the right chip for the job you'll certainly be blessed. The board has a great layout. The engineers who designed this board get a thumbs up for moving the power connector to the right of the DIMMs and for moving the floppy connector to the far corner of the board. The best part is it comes with ALL this for $120! I would not hesitate to recommend this board to anyone who needs a feature packed KT333 board and wants to have some overclocking fun also.