MagicPro MP-K7V-400A Motherboard Review
VIA's second attempt at a 333MHz
FSB AthlonXP chipset, known as the KT400A, is a
good one even though it is a little too late to make a
difference. If the KT400A chipset had been released when the KT400 came out last year, the AMD chipset
market would certainly look quite different than it does right now under the
auspices of nVidia's nForce2.
Of
course, VIA's KT400A chipset wasn't released at the best of time, and now it
seems as though it has firmly secured its position as the black sheep of the AMD
chipset family. On top of that, with the recent announcement of the
VIA KT600
chipset it certainly looks as though VIA have set the KT400A up to fail.
The only
positive aspect out of all of this is that
VIA's KT400A chipset commands a very economical price tag. And so, today we're going to
be testing the bright purple Magic Pro MP-K7V-400A mainboard which should
appeal to budget minded consumers.
Have Magic Pro, a name synonymous with inexpensive computer components been
able to present a KT400A based motherboard attractive to the
end user? Let's find out!
|
magic-pro mp-k7v-400a |
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Ships with the following:
- IDE ATA66/100 Cable
- Floppy Drive Cable
- Users Manual
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| Brackets: |
None
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With a
retail price of just $118 CDN ($85 US), the MP-K7V-400A is quite
inexpensively priced, but of course the motherboard is also quite bare of
features.
In terms of goodies, the board
includes an onboard 5.1 soundcard and 10/100 LAN. In terms of expansion there
are five PCI slots as well as a lone 8x AGP
port.
The board supports 200/266/333 MHz FSB based
AthlonXP processors and the three DIMM slots can be occupied with up to 4GB of
PC1600/2100/2700/3200 DDR memory.
Please note, the MP-K7V-400A does
not support the new
400 MHz based AthlonXP processors.... despite a name which could suggest
that to some individuals. The "400" in KV7-400A in fact refers to 400MHz DDR memory.
It was quite refreshing to work with the relatively
small MP-K7V-400A. You're not going to have problems installing this motherboard
into even those small cramped mid tower cases. Since Magic-Pro does not actually
produce their own motherboards I'm not sure who manufactured this particular
board, though it does look a lot like a Soltek model.
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