Microstar M7VKB : A new review for an old motherboard
Written: Jan 17 '03 (Updated Jan 20 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Additional ISA card , may be cheap
Cons: No DDR , FSB is 200 MHz , no on boards Graphics or LAN
The Bottom Line: If someone throws this board , pick it up it is still useful.
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| e_commentor's Full Review: Biostar M7VKB Motherboard |
My office computer has Biostar’s M7VKB motherboard with 1 GHz AMD Athlon. After joining epinion I started looking at this motherboard with a view to write a review for this motherboard.
It is an old motherboard and it does not make any sense to write a review on it - almost after 3 years of its introduction. It is probably not a product that is in market and the review will not do the justification with that motherboard. It would have been more appropriate had this review been written about three years ago. I finally took the decision to write the review only because there was no review written on it at the time I was writing this review.
Let us start looking at the memory first. The motherboard supports only SDRAM and not DDR. The DDR Memory or the Double data rate Memory work on the rising as well as falling edge of the clock thus effectively doubling the rate of the transfer. SDRAM work on only the rising edge of the clock. The motherboard supports 100 MHz and 133 MHz of clock speed which are characterized as PC100 and PC133 memory. It has 3 DIMM sockets and can support a maximum of 1.5 GB memory. My computer for example is using two PC133 DIMMs each of 128 MB to make a total of 256 MB of memory which is just fine for my work. The SDRAMs are cheaper than that of the DDR Memories and this can be a plus point in the choice. But DDR will be faster.
The other factor that is going to limit the performance of this motherboard is the FSB or the Front Side Bus speed. Front Side Bus is the Bus that connects the Northbridge chip to the CPU. Northbridge chip has for buses. We may picturise the Northbridge chip as sitting in the center. The North of this chip has the FSB and the processor. The right bus is the Memory Bus. The Left is the AGP Bus and the South connects to Southbridge. The M7KB uses VIA KT133 northbridge and not KT133A. The major difference between KT133 and KT133A is that, while KT133A can support 266 MHz speed , KT133 will support only 200 MHz speed. So even when the CPU supports 266 MHz FSB , the motherboard will not support it and that is what limits the performance. The is the most serious drawback of this motherboard thinking in present term.
The southbridge uses VIA 686A chip. I noticed that there are two versions of the M7VKB – one is Ver1.0 and another in Ver 2.0. While Ver 1.0 has 686A , the Ver 2.0 has 686B. The 686B adds support for Ultra ATA/100 for hard drives. Note that there are three speed grades for Ultra DMA transfer ATA3/33 , ATA/66 and ATA/100. If you are using a ver 1.0 that has 686A chipset then it does not make sense to have a hard disk with ATA/100 support. The motherboard has two IDE sockets to support 4 IDE hard disk drive. There is nothing special in it as in most of the motherboards.
The board has 5 PCI slot and the a noticeable feature is that it has one ISA slot. The ISA based use is declining to the extent of becoming extinct but this board still has a socket for it . You may consider if you have an application for ISA based board.
The board does not has the on board AGP. It does not have on board LAN. So even from the cost reduction point of view it does not help much. The motherboard has AC'97 2.1 Audio Onboard Codec and I have been using an amplifier and it seems to work fine. As usual, it has one Parallel, two Serial ,one PS/2 Mouse, 1 PS/2 Keyboard , 2 Rear USB, Game Port, Speak-out, Line-in, Mic.-in and Floppy Disk as IOs. The dimension is ATX form factor Dimension: 30.5cm X 22.2cm ( W x L ) which is a big.
The PCMark2002 showed the following result with Athlon 1 GHz and 256 MB of RAM.
CPU Score 2405
Memory Score 1674
CPU tests
Jpeg Decoding 8.9 MPixels/s
Zlib Compression 3.4 MB/s
Zlib Decompression 38.7 MB/s
Text Search 64.5 KRounds/s
Audio Conversion 48.6 KB/s
3D Vector Calculation 30.9 FPS
Memory tests
Memory Tests
Raw Block Read - 3072KB 669.0 MB/s
Raw Block Read - 536KB 677.4 MB/s
Raw Block Read - 384KB 695.4 MB/s
Raw Block Read - 48KB 11345.9 MB/s
Raw Block Read - 6KB 11081.9 MB/s
Raw Block Write - 3072KB 224.4 MB/s
Raw Block Write - 1536KB 218.8 MB/s
Raw Block Write - 384KB 224.7 MB/s
Raw Block Write - 48KB 7102.6 MB/s
Raw Block Write - 6KB 6977.7 MB/s
Raw Block Modify - 3072KB 247.1 MB/s
Raw Block Modify - 536KB 242.8 MB/s
Raw Block Modify - 384KB 249.7 MB/s
Raw Block Modify - 48KB 3792.2 MB/s
Raw Block Modify - 6KB 3805.9 MB/s
Random Access - 24576 (1536KB) items 427.3 MB/s
Random Access - 12288 (768KB) items 431.4 MB/s
Random Access - 6144 (384KB) items 432.2 MB/s
Random Access - 1536 (96KB) items 2192.1 MB/s
Random Access - 768 (48KB) items 2883.4 MB/s
Random Access - 96 (6KB) items 3327.0 MB/s
At the time of the review being written I do not have the data for the other motherboards , so I am not making comparisons with other motherboards. I shall be conducting PCMark2002 on some more similar motherboard and it will be interesting to see how better other motherboards compare with this.
I am giving this motherboard 2 stars. Probably I would have given it 4 stars had I reviewed it 3 years ago. But in computer hardware and technologies stars are becoming a factor of time. Still I hope the review will be helpful for any buyer or user who comes across this motherboard.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): Not known
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Epinions.com ID:
e_commentor
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Member: Vikas Shukla
Location: Attleboro, MA , USA
Reviews written: 41
Trusted by: 16 members
About Me:
I am a hardware design engineer. I also provide SEO, Social media marketing consultancy.
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