The first thing I did was try and screw a fan into the heatsink,
with no avail - I just couldn't get the leverage, so I removed it. And what
did I find?
Yuck! Frag tape. What is the point of a 24k Gold Heatsink with frag tape?
Now this is not as bad as some methods I have seen (such as the BP6 which
had no transfer paste at all) but I would have preffered to seen a method
such as the KT7 uses - thermal paste and a heatsink and fan held by spring-loaded
pins.
So I removed the frag tape and cleaned both surfaces. I then
took this oppurtunity to screw a fan onto the heatsink (I used the old fan
from my KT7). I then used the method of 4 blobs of superglue and paste in
the middle to attatch it. This cooling bought the stabilty up to a good standard
and crashes where no more - with the heatsink reaching around 34c.
But what about overclocking this chipset? Try 102mhz!! Yes that
is poor I know. So I increased the I/O voltage to 3.4v and could run at around
112mhz as do most KT133 chipsets.
What I had here was the equivalent of buying a Celeron 566 that
would not run stably at stock speed unless I used better than stock cooling
- IMO I was unlucky as I have heard of people having absolutlely fine stability
on these boards even with just a gold heatsink. I don't blame Aopen for this,
but Via.
Another problem I had was random errors on turning the computer
on. Almost every morning I would turn the computer on to hear "your floppy
drive may have a problem" or "your AGP may have a problem".
I don't know what the cause of this problem was, whether it was the board,
my 250W psu (not really big enough) but this was fixed by holding "home"
on boot. Once in windows there where no stability issues at all - which makes
me believe the PSU is not the problem. mmm, strange!
Ram Speed
As this used the same chipset as the KT7, I was not expecting
much in the way of ram performance difference - but in the bios I found no
option for 4-way Memory Interleaving. Annoyed at this I took the WCPREDIT
route, only to find that this option is in fact switched on by default. I
would show you some comparitive benchmarks of what I took from my KT7 review
to this, but since then i fried my Tbird - so this would not be a fair test.
But the performance was pretty much what I would expect from a KT7.
