Leadtek 7350KDA - Don't bother

mschell

Senior member
Oct 9, 1999
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I recently picked up the Leadtek board which uses the Sis 735 chip(set) This chipset allows 1/5 and 1/6 pci/agp dividers which should allow extremely high FBS overclocking without overclocking the PCI/AGP bus.
After a paticulary frustrating setup where both a TV tuner card and an IDE RAID controller card simply would not work with the board and the included "Speed Gear" FBS overclocking utility won't install to W2K/XP, I was able to see how this board overclocks using the limited FBS available in the BIOS. Using an unlocked AXIA 1.2GHz and some decent Nayna? -7 2t memory the motherboard croaks somewhere between 138 and 144MHz FBS. By croaking, I mean no post and a dying bleeping noise from the pc speaker. Strangly enough, one can run the fastest memory settings at 138/138 but even the slowest settings won't allow posting at the next step up which is 144MHz. So much for using those 1/5 or 1/6 dividers. Speaking of memory settings, there's lots of arcane options that I'm sure some engineers would not understand the ramifications of, they are not explaned in the manual and should have been linked by a slow, med, fast switch in my opinion. The designers must not of had access to W2K or XP because the boards BIOS does not properly support those OS's ACPI which means resource problems if you install the OS in the (default) ACPI mode. I haven't tried the board with Win98. There might be less problems with add on devices/drivers and the Speed Gear would allow more control with overclocking.
Leadtek needs to stick to copying Nvidia reference video cards and leave motherboard design and production to the big boys.
Just my 2c - M.
 

clumsum

Senior member
Nov 19, 2000
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Thanks for the frank review .............. real world user experience is the best guide to these products.

Perhaps Leadtek will follow up with some bios tweaks or drivers to boost performance and hopefully, you may not have wasted your $$$!

I'm not sure I would try to over-clock with a TV tuner card (or raid controller) before just getting a basic system up and running stabily?
 

JOSEPHLB

Banned
Jun 20, 2001
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I'll add to that, that I had many registry problems, and BSOD's just trying to install the operating system on this board as well.

There is an article on this as well over on Overclockers.com

The setup of it is great, and easy... But, no matter what I did, I couldn't get a clean install of any operating system...

I guess I'll let this baby sit and collect dust, until a BIOS is released that fixes those problems..
 

mschell

Senior member
Oct 9, 1999
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Just a little update after I've had some more time to spend with the board.
All hardware and software installations were done at the default 133/133/ clock settings. The power supply is a new 351W Enermax.
I got external video working on the system using a MSI G2Ti Pro Nvidia VIVO video card. Getting the VIVO function on the card to work was quite a task but once working the picture output using the bundled Wincoder program is excellent. Since I pull S-Video from a DSS system I have no real need for a channel tuner and the picture I'm getting is much better than my other tuner cards with the Win2000/XP drivers.

After installing some gaming software I'm finding the board offers very good performance for games. I'm having none of the strange visual glitches I had when the MSI video card was running in my (old) Iwill KK266 running the exact same video drivers. 3DMark2001 scores are up over700pts! over the Iwill board that was running the CPU faster. MS Fltsim2000 runs noticeably smoother also.
Stability has been excellent as compared to the Iwill board which seemed sensitive to heat after I replaced the CPU heatsink's (OCZ Copper Gladiator) fan, a hairdryer like sounding Delta 7k RPM with a much quieter 5K unit.
The chipset, IDE and AGP drivers are the ones installed by XP, they seem to be working well. Sandra reports both hard drives benchmarking around 20% faster than the same drives on the Via KK266
I'm now thinking the board is not quite so bad as originally though although I sure do miss the extra IDE ports and 1MHz FBS stepping would sure be nice. - M.
 

JOSEPHLB

Banned
Jun 20, 2001
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What BIOS revision are you using?

Also, I'm curious as to what revision of the 7350KDA you have; if at all possible to tell??
 

mschell

Senior member
Oct 9, 1999
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I'm using the shipping BIOS version. There is a later version - 5390112.bin that I haven't tried as of yet.
As for board version number, I think it's a rev 1.1. It was shipped from New Egg.com on 12/6.
 

panhead49

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Jan 27, 2001
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so in order to o/c in 1 mhz increments., you have to use a" installed" software o/cing tool.??? or else you have to go with there set levels....133..145...150...whatever...is this true.??
i read an early review of this board and i thought they would have added a better o/cing opition in a final release........i quess they didnt...lol
 

fastvideo

Senior member
Aug 8, 2000
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i have this m/b with the latest bios flashed. with winxp, don't have any problems. better than k7s5a.
 

Ionizer86

Diamond Member
Jun 20, 2001
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Is it true that the 1/5 divider only kicks in when your FSB is at 166mhz? 1/5 * 166 = 33. Or can you decide when to bring in the 1/5 divider and 2/5 AGP divider?
 

mschell

Senior member
Oct 9, 1999
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Yes the "Speed Gear" utility is nothing more than a soft FBS changing utility paired with a hardware monitor. The board would need a different clock generator to allow 1MHz steps from the BIOS. Because Win2000 and XP use a hardware abstraction layer it is difficult to get direct control over the hardware from the operating system, theis is why the utility will not work in Win2000/XP (according to Leadtek).
The divisor ratios are pre set as follows,
CPU MEM PCI
133/133/33 - 1/4 divisor
138/138/34
141/141/35
150/150/30 - 1/5 divisor
166/166/33

There are other options but they make the boards memory bus run asyncronusly from the FBS and will result in lower performance.
Double the PCI frequency to get the AGP frequency, there is no 2/5 AGP divisor that I am aware of.