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ABit VA-20 (and Gigabyte KM 400)

Throughout this article I will describe ABIT VA-20 motherboard. The same description will apply to Gigabyte KM400 motherboard as they are identical in all respects except for occassional color difference.

This motherboard houses socket 462, which accepts AMD Athlon XP, Athlon and Duron chips with front side bus at 266, 333 and 400MHz. It uses chipset VIA KM400A and VT8237. The board supports two DIMMs that hold DDR400, DDR333, DDR266 or DDR200 unbuffered memory. The board can take 2GB of memory. From peripheral standpoint, there is an integrated graphic card, two channel SATA/150 RAID0 and RAID1 support, onboard 10/100 Mbit ethernet and 6 channel sound card. The board comes in micro ATX format so you can get it installed in one of those really tiny computer cases.

From left: Gigabyte KM400, Abit VA-20

Storage consideration

This motherboard has two IDE channels for four ATA/100 devices. There are two SATA connectors on board, but these will only support two harddrives. In the back of the motherboard, there are four USB ports. Since USB can technically support up to 127 devices, the storage should not be an issue.

Speed consideration

Built in video card is very basic. It eats heavily into clock cycles available from your memory as it uses now very common approach of fighting over memory with your CPU. Video always wins, that is why certain memory intensive operations will take an incredibly long amount of time. First thing you must do to improve speed is to install AGP card and not use the onboard video chip. Overall memory limit of 2GB will provide good performance, but will leave no room to grow.

What is it good for?

Let's start with what is it not good for - it is not good to build server around it or high performance system. This board is good for internet browsing or office related work, such as document writing, emails and ordinary applications that do not require cutting edge performance or even stability.