T-Break brengt ons een review van de Chaintech 7AJA, da's een Socket A KT133 bordje voor je Duron of Thunderbird met 5xPCI, 1xAGP, 1xAMR en 1xISA. Dankzij de multiplier dipswitches onboard en een bios waarmee je bussnelheden tot 166MHz in stappen van 1 of 2MHz kunt instellen is dit plankje erg tweaker vriendelijk:
Overclocking has to be one of the biggest attractions on the 7AJA. The four dip switches found below the DIMM slots have been described in the user’s manual as “clock-ratio adjustment switches.” Put this together with a BIOS that offers upto 160MHz FSB in 1 or 2 MHz increments and you have what any Overclocker will call a killer motherboard. Of course, all this sounds very good on paper but were we able to succeed? Well, yes and No…
We first tried out the board with the older 700MHz Duron and before adjusting the clock-multiplier, increased the FSB. To our surprise, we were able to run this particular 700MHz Duron very stably at 106MHz (Just a reminder that we were unable to take it above 101MHz in all of the previous motherboards.) Next came the dip-switches adjustment which I changed to the setting of 7.5 (the default of the 700MHz Duron is 7.0) What did I see at the POST? AMD Duron running at 750MHz! Yeah baby yeah! It actually worked! After 7.5, I switched it to 8.0…Got POST at 800MHz – but unfortunately none of the benchmarks completed. Anything over 8.0 did not POST, but hey, you don’t hear me complaining!
Then I decided to try out the newer 600MHz Duron. I thought I’d start out with the clock multiplier adjustment which I set for 7.0. No luck – the CPU still POSTed at 600MHz. Even the 6.5 setting didn’t make it run any higher. I’m guessing that AMD have implemented some kind of new technique for locking the multiplier- hopefully a future BIOS update from Chaintech will solve this. Having failed with the multiplier, I proceeded to overclock the good old fashion way- adjusting the FSB. I was able to go upto 111MHz with the 600MHz Duron, which made it run at 666MHz. Anything over that (but below 116 FSB) posted but couldn’t complete benchmarks. But again, you won’t hear me complain. As far as t-break is concerned, the 7AJA is the king of overclocking in Socket-A motherboards.