VIA KT333 Motherboard Roundup - June 2002

Onboard Audio Performance Audio Winbench 99 (CPU Utilization - 16-bit, 32 voices, streaming) EPoX 8K3A+ Gigabyte GA-7VRXP ECS K7VTA3 MSI KT3 Ultra Shuttle AK35GT2/R Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra ASUS A7V333 ABIT AT7 1.12 1.28 1.36 2.66 5.32 5.51 6.17 8.06 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 10

Something with the implementation of the ALC650 codec on the AT7 caused it to have an unusually high CPU utilization compared to other boards with the same codec. Once again it's clear that implementation as well as codec have a great influence on audio performance.

Onboard Audio Performance Quake III Arena (Percent drop with sound on - lower is better) EPoX 8K3A+ MSI KT3 Ultra ECS K7VTA3 Gigabyte GA-7VRXP ABIT AT7 ASUS A7V333 Shuttle AK35GT2/R Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra 22.0 22.3 22.6 23.1 24.8 25.3 25.3 25.5 | 0 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 26 | 31

As a more "real-world" comparison we turned on sound under Quake III Arena and measured the performance hit to compare all of the audio solutions. The difference in the performance hit between the best and the worst solutions isn't anything too great illustrating that these on-board audio devices all offer relatively similar performance. In the end it comes down to features and output quality that determine the true winner here.