What was supposed to be a reason to buy a KT400 board was the presence of a /6 PCI divisor. That way, you could try to run at over 200MHz FSB while keeping the overclock of your hard drive and PCI devices down to reasonable levels.
If you don’t know why PCI speed is important in overclocking, please read this
Now we find out from Abit, which “offers” a /6 divisor, that it doesn’t and can’t work.
To quote:
“Clock generator on AT7-MAX2 / KD7 do support 1/6 PCI divider; however, VIA has confirmed that KT400 chipset does not support 1/6 PCI divider even the clock generator can support it. This is the chipset limitation and can not be solved by motherboard vendors.”
In the past, we’ve noted approvingly that at least the KD7 offered a /6 divisor, since its manual said so. This is obviously not so, and we apologize for assuming that Abit wouldn’t make false statements about such things in their KD7 manual (in fact, the manual available at their Taiwanese website still says it is available).
But they did.
They have company, though.
The manual for the Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra says the same thing, and it was revised less than two weeks ago.
It is difficult to believe that Abit and Soyo did not know they had a feature that didn’t work.
It’s brazen to describe it in the manual when they know that it doesn’t.
How Did The Review Sites Do?
Per Neoseeker, the only place that reviewed the board was T-Break, which did catch this
The Soyo board has been reviewed more often, but only Lost Circuits caught the problem. The others do not seem to have tested it.
What To Do?
Obviously, if you want to run at over 200MHz, and don’t want to take a high risk of PCI devices not functioning at that speed, hard drives scrambling themselves, nice things like that, you’d better not buy a KT400. Wait to see if the nForce2 offers a /6 divisor.
Per Soyo and Abit offering what they at least should have known they couldn’t deliver, what do you think should be done?
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