Asus Yes... Promise No
Written: Aug 28 '02 (Updated Aug 29 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast and easy to set up
Cons: The Promise ATA100 setup
The Bottom Line: Asus should release a non-Promise version of this board; only then would I recommend it.
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| joeybear's Full Review: Asus A7V |
I picked up one of these motherboards at a flea market, and was impressed overall. Setup was easy, the manual was very good, and aside from what I've written below, the board was fast.
However, the Promise ATA setup isn't anything to smile about. There's a bug with it that causes a "volume was removed with open files on it" blue screen message to appear, and I have yet to find a patch for the bug. This bug raises heck with hardware and software installs, because during a software or hardware installation, the install program will lose access to the CD-ROM, and the install becomes corrupted until you tell Windows where
the CD-ROM is located.
Along with that, it's near impossible to get an SBLive Audio setup to work with it. (Creative's fault, because SBLive isn't made to work with bus mastering... design shortsightedness at it's worst.)
And speaking of cards, the Promise BIOS causes all kinds of major IRQ headaches. Here's the most glaring example...
I set my BIOS to "No PnP OS", and then manually assigned the SBLive to IRQ5, but no matter what IRQ I assigned to SBLive, the Promise controller would hop onto the very same IRQ. Thus, on boot, the BIOS would warn me that the SB was in conflict with the Promise controller. No matter how many times I changed the IRQ for the SB, the Promise controller would jump onto the same IRQ. At one point the computer was actually rebooting itself over and over at the moment the Windows screen appeared.
All in all, Asus has taken a good mobo and ruined it with the addition of the Promise ATA100 setup.
Sorry Asus... as a long-time user of your boards, this one has me disappointed, and it just doesn't cut it. The Asus CUSL2 is a much better board.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 100
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Epinions.com ID:
joeybear
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Member: Joe
Location: Butler, PA USA
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 0 members
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