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Mercury KVT600X-L Via Socket A Motherboard and AMD Athlon XP 3000+

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 | Motherboards, Reviews

The Mercury KVT600X-L Via Socket A Motherboard and AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor set make a great start to a low priced computer.

The fully-featured motherboard and the ever popular classic the AMD Athlon XP 3000+ make a good pair, and a good start for that low cost system.

The motherboard comes with all the features that can be expected from most motherboards today.

• 2 Memory slots (400MHz DDR)
• Socket A processor socket
• AGP 8x graphics slot
• 5 PCI slots
• SATA and IDE drive support
• USB 2.0
• Sound card built in

Mercury is a new name for me in the computer motherboard industry. There are many out there so it is possible that I missed this one. A low cost motherboard offers many of the same features as more expensive name brand models, but without the attention to detail.

USB 2.0 allows you to attach it to cameras and things like portable memory sticks. Almost essential for today.

The socket A processor interface is dated. There are no longer any processors made for this socket. However this is standard for a value system, so a future upgrade would probably require a motherboard upgrade too.

AGP 8x graphics slot allows you to put a high speed graphics card in for performance in games, and in general use. PCIe is the newer kind, but it has actually not made significant improvements on AGP 8x, yet. The graphics card makes the biggest difference to the graphics of the computer. It frees up memory and takes the workload of graphics away from the processor to increase performance.

5 PCI slots ensure that upgrades will be easy in the future. The PCI interface is the standard for cards that get added to the computer.

SATA is a nice surprise too. SATA is the successor of the IDE interface for hard disks and optical drives. It allows much faster speeds and allows you more options in choosing a hard drive. It does not however offer the RAID capabilities that often come with that interface.

The AMD Athlon XP 3000+ is a classic processor. This chip came out a few years back. It is still a great processor and at the time it was released it was a great deal considering how much performance you could get, as well as it’s good value.

Built in sound rounds off the package.

So in summary…

Good points

• Good features
• Excellent price
• A great combination with the Athlon 3000+
• Great start for a home computer

Bad points

• Outdated socket A
• Less overclocking potential than name-brand models

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