Acorp 7KT400A

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

Layout

The Acorp KT400A motherboard is another from a couple of relative unknowns in the US that we are looking at today. First, the CPU socket of this board is in the right direction, that is, not perpendicular like the two previous motherboards we looked at. Acorp also has included the four mounting holes for older, larger heatsinks. The socket area is a bit crowded on the lower left side of the socket, the corner nearest to some capacitors.

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One thing I noted during testing was the location of the ATX power connector was somewhat cumbersome. With the locking tab set in, towards the printer connector on the outside of the board, it was difficult to get my not-so-fat fingers in between the connector and the tab in order to remove the power cable. Another negative to note on the layout is the location of the only fan connector in proximity to the CPU socket – below the MOSFETs and north bridge. Because it was so far away, my stock Athlon XP heatsink fan’s power cable didn’t reach and I was forced to use an extender. That can definitely be a pain in the ass for any one that doesn’t have parts like that sitting around.

The north bridge heatsink itself was very poorly designed and investigating it showed that it made very poor contact with the chip itself. However, because the board only has 5 PCI slots, the DIMMs are far enough from the AGP slot that they don’t interfere with installation or removal of your memory – one of the good things on this board. The AGP slot doesn’t have a retention clip at all, and I found that to be a problem somewhat as my KVM connectors are quite heavy on the AGP card.

The IDE connectors are farther down on the board, which is fine, and with the floppy cable there too, there isn’t much else to see.

Features

For features, Acorp has the fairly standard low cost showing of a 6-channel Realtek audio solution and four USB headers on the external panel of the motherboard. Ta dum.

Included Extras

In all fairness, I got this board probably before they had the manuals ready.

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Bios

The Acorp 7KT400A bios is one that doesn’t have a lot of options for overclockers and enthusiasts. Their memory timings are pretty good, actually, as you can see below.

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But other than that, you have the ability to change the FSB, UP TO 166 MHz when the jumper on the motherboard is set to 166 MHz.

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Also, on this particular board, AGP 8x wouldn’t enable, and any attempts I made to set it to 8x wouldn’t stay set in the bios, and I think you’ll find the benchmark numbers show that as well.

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