Rev 1.02 This Dog Will Hunt.
Written: Dec 16 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: "Fasten your Seat Belt" Speed, "Your Grandma's Buick" stability.
Cons: Gimme a minute, I'm thinking. None I guess, YET!
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| VagabondSteve's Full Review: Asus A7V |
Funny how quickly we get used to speed. I mean, I recently reviewed an Abit KA7-100 MB with the 750 SlotA Athlon, and was raving about it's performance. A little time passes, I get a few bucks to spare and BANG! An Athlon 1.1GHz T-Bird is in my reach, and I got to have it!
Why This Board?
The T-Bird CPU's wouldn't work on my old board, so I had to shop.
I selected this motherboard based on it's features and a friends' experience with it. The on-board ATA 100 controller, the ability to support 8 IDE devices, the 7 USB ports, the powered USB ports, the ASUS Probe system monitor, and the "no-legacy" (read that "no ISA slots")design all fit my needs. My system is my career, so I can't do without all the devices I've attached. And I have a lot of junk attached.
High Performance Users will like this board.
Anyone who wants to build a "bleeding-edge" system, without too much "bleeding" will like this version of the A7V. Overclocking can be done for those so inclined, and growth is definitely an option.
Why not some other board?
I wanted ATA100 (30GB Maxtor), ATA66(13GB Maxtor), 7 IDE devices (those two plus 3.5", 5.25" FDD's, CD-ROM, CD-RW, and ZIP100), support for Athlon Thunderbirds at more than a Gigahertz, room for a big heatsink and fan combo, and lots of USB devices. The choices are limited for IDE controllers that allow up to 8 (instead of 4) devices on the motherboard. I wanted to avoid using the separate PCI-card ATA100 controller if I could.
Results
I installed the 1.1 GHz Athlon and the Super Cooler fan on the board, the fan mount is very tight. I installed the two Mushkin Rev2 2-2-2 128 MB memory modules, and put it in the case. I installed the Radeon DDR 32 AGP card, the Sound Blaster Live! PCI card, and the 10/100 NIC PCI card for my home network. I connected the power and signal cables for the hard drives, CD, CDRW, ZIP and floppies, the USB "slot" ports and power cable, and the LED leads and was very quickly ready to test it. Hooked up the Keyboard, mouse, monitor, laser and inkjet printers, scanner, digital camera, joystick, external fax/modem, external/USB NIC for the Cable modem, and was ready to go. (Told you I had a lot of junk connected!)
Power on brought a long beep followed by three short ones. A quick look at the "better-than-average" manual revealed that that sound was probably a poorly seated AGP card. Removed and reseated the video card and it went to POST. A quick trip into the BIOS, reviewed the settings (did I say better-than-average-manual"?) and booted in "command prompt only". No problem. Let's get ready to RUMBLE!
Real Men Don't Reload Windows!
I went into safe mode, removed the HPT Controller driver that was used with the Abit, and restarted. Several restarts later the drivers were loaded for the new board and configuration I was running. It was so smooth, it was scary. Either this is getting easier or I'm getting more practice at it. Networking to the home network, the Internet and the Internet Connection Sharing came right up with little problem. Sound worked from the start. Smooth. Never did reload Win98SE. (I DO have several VIA driver files on the C: drive, as experience with this process taught me the IDE CD-ROM's won't all come up while reconfiguring, so you can't load them from there.) Like I said , SMOOTH!
Performance - YEE HAW! Faster than a Florida Recount! (Sorry!)
I did some Wintune benchmarks, and I had done some mathematical extrapolation from my 750MHz (on the KA7-100 board) and a friends 900 MHz (on an A7V board). I had some idea of how fast this setup "should" be. It's even faster. 3392 MIPS CPU, 1382 MFLOPS FPU, Memory 2834 MB/s.
You go!
The disk performance is staggering, WinTune shows Uncached speed of 9.5-10.1 MB/s and Cached speed of 156+ MB/s. These are not misprints. I rebooted and re-ran the tests several times to confirm. WOW.
Real World
My compiles of VB code run at least 50% faster, though they were very fast with the 750 too. (Gee, I save 15 seconds!) Overall the system speed IS much better, but the real change is stability.
I was impressed with the KA7-100 and how stable it was. This is yards ahead. Maybe miles ahead.
Shutdown was inconsistant with the Abit, and it didn't start up on every attempt without a reset. No big deal, but it also would hang occasionally when on the net through the USB connected NIC to the Cable Modem. This is gone now. In fact I keep waiting for the freeze or "blue screen of death" (BSOD) to appear. Win98 SE is running, so it has to freeze, right? Hasn't done it yet. The suspense is killing me.
With the Abit, my power saving monitor would report "No Signal" in a big blue box in the middle of the screen when the board powered the monitor off. I couldn't find a setting that ended that. Now it's gone, nada, zilch. Works great now.
Summary - "This Dog Will Hunt"
Well, I am sold. Maybe it's the 1.02 revision, the 9/26/2000 bios or the "way I held my mouth" (for the fishermen out there) but it is wonderful. If I was to build another box right now, I'd use this board.
I think the improvement in speed due to the CPU is a separate issue, but the same Maxtor drive on the Abit would benchmark between 4 and 5. So the speed boost is more than the CPU.
(NOTE: My friend with the 900 on this ASUS board gets Disk Uncached at 5-6 MB/s to my 9-10 MB/s, but his board is a Rev 1.01 I think.)
All the other components (memory, video, etc.) were on the Abit too. This board got it right on speed.
The stability is great, contrary to a report someone else posted, but that is probably due to the Revisions ASUS made in the 1.02 version(?), and maybe the latest BIOS. I have no doubt as to his honesty and ability with the board before, but I'll bet that reviewer would sing a different song now.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 149.00
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Epinions.com ID:
VagabondSteve
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Reviews written: 3
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