A no-frills solid standby
Written: Dec 18 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: stability, on-board ATA/100
Cons: size, dipswitches
|
|
|
| taciturn6097's Full Review: Asus A7V |
My purchase of AsusTek's A7V was a rash decision. I had wanted Abit's KT7-RAID, but the store only had an A7V, and I wanted my new components that day, so I went ahead and got it. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised.
Upon opening the box, the first thing you will notice is that this motherboard is of mammoth proportions. If you ever wanted to test out whether your case is big enough to handle the biggest ATX motherboard the standard will allow, this is for you. The A7V easily filled the motherboard tray of the new case I purchased for the occasion. Why this board is so big is a mystery to me, as the A7V is not as feature-packed as its primary competitor the KT7-RAID.
To give a quick run-down of the feature list: The A7V comes with 5 PCI slots, one AGP 4x Pro slot, and as a tribute to AsusTek's pandering to OEMS, a small AMR(audio-modem riser) slot where a more useful ISA slot would be. Needless to say, the AMR slot is probably hardly ever going to be used by the type of people who would know enough about motherboards to read this review. While nothing as of this writing required the extra power provided by the AGP Pro connector(at least no products on the consumer level), my personal suspicion is that had it been released, 3dfx's Voodoo5 6000 may have benefited from the extra power boost. Other than that, the AGP interface on the A7V has all the standard capabilities given to AGP by VIA's KT133 chipset - 4x speed, sidebanding, fast writes, etc. All current AGP cards will work with the AGP Pro slot, and a handy slot insert blocking the extra pins is already in the motherboard when purchased to avoid confusion.
Installation and hookup of cables was no more difficult or easier than with any other modern motherboard on the market right now. There are no backwards design decisions keeping the user from having an easy time mounting the board. CPU setup and autodetection works without any need of setting jumpers or dipswitches, though there are some of those on the board. I will get to that in a minute. The A7V includes a Promise UltraDMA/100 IDE controller on board, with included DMA/66 cabling necessary for those fastest of hard drives to operate at their highest speeds. I should note for those who have no Ultra DMA/100 drives: By default, the Promise BIOS spends about 10 seconds each boot checking for UltraDMA/100 devices on its controller. As you can imagine, this gets annoying quickly. There is a way to disable this in the motherboard's BIOS setup, though you may have to download the latest stable BIOS from AsusTek's website, http://www.asus.com.tw, which I would readily recommend downloading with any new motherboard purchase.
One strike against both the A7V and the KT7-RAID is that the user must always immediately update their 4-in-1 drivers from VIA's website as soon as the computer is up and running. I naively used the drivers from the installation CD and experienced severe instability. Also users of AU8820-based PCI sound cards(any card based on the now-defunct Aureal's Vortex 1 chipset) should avoid any motherboard on the KT133 platform, as the two do not get along. Windows 98 bluescreened on me when I attempted to play sound, which bothered me because I should have been able to find that information easily before I bought the motherboard. I am not certain that this problem exists on the KX133, the slot-A Athlon chipset from VIA, though there is a high chance that it does, as the KT133 and KX133 are almost the same chipset.
Now on to those mysterious dipswitches and jumpers on the motherboard. The better part of these control settings for overclocking, including voltage, front side bus, and CPU multiplier adjustments for unlocked Durons and Athlons(how to unlock these CPUs is beyond the scope of this review; I suggest http://www.anandtech.com or http://www.tomshardware.com for detailed guides to this operation). This is where the KT7-RAID really is superior to the A7V, as the KT7-RAID has BIOS adjustments for these settings, which is of course infinitely easier to work with than physical switches and jumpers. I found, however, that it really was not a pain to do. The settings are well documented in the excellent manual included with the A7V.
The latest beta BIOS for the A7V apparently does implement BIOS manipulation of these CPU attributes, but my experience with beta BIOSes has never been good, so I recommend you try it if you know that it might screw some stuff up, and to make sure that you have a backup BIOS on a floppy and are ready to type blind. Another boon to overclockers is that Asus has kindly placed many of the capacitors near the CPU on a riser board, leaving extra space for large heatsinks. I was able to install a Globalwin FOP32 without issue, though admittedly that isn't pushing the envelope when it comes to size.
The KT7-RAID and the A7V are almost the same motherboard. Both support all of the overclocking features you would want, both are stable and both are well-supported with frequent BIOS updates from the manufacturer. The KT7-RAID has, of course, an on-board IDE RAID controller, but that adds to the cost for people who don't need extra frills like that. My final judgement? The only differences you will see between the two motherboards is in the setup, and personal experience has demonstrated that the A7V is extraordinarily stable and reliable compared to my previous motherboard, Abit's BH6. If you don't mind a little extra inconvenience with setting clock multipliers and voltages, the A7V is definitely worth your consideration. While my purchase was originally a fast decision without much thought, I couldn't be happier with how it turned out.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 135
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
taciturn6097
|
|
Member: Andrew Lusk
Location: Downers Grove, IL
Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 1 member
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.