Great Athlon/Duron board!
Written: Jan 29 '01 (Updated Jan 29 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stable, easy to use, overclockable in BIOS with latest BIOS updates.
Cons: No RAID Support
The Bottom Line: Great stable AMD board. Lots of room for heatsinks, overclockable in BIOS (with latest rev). ATA100, but no RAID.
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| photon_7's Full Review: Asus A7V |
This is a VIA KT133 chipset based Socket A motherboard, intended for AMD Duron or Socket A Athlon ("Thunderbird") processors. It supports processor speeds up to 1GHz, the 200MHz bus standard on Durons and Athlons, up to 1.5GB of PC100 and PC133 SDRAM, AGP 4X, and include two onboard IDE controller chips, for a total four IDE connectors or 8 drives possible. One IDE controller is an Promise Ultra ATA/100 controller, while the other is the standard ATA/66 that comes on the VIA chipset. There are no ISA slots.
Installation is quite easy. Everything is well laid out. In particular the vertical board that hold the power components for the processor makes a lot more room for larger heatsinks.
The manual is thorough, if somewhat brief. I wish they would go into detailed descriptions of BIOS options. Anything is better than "Set to ENABLED to enable this option, DISABLED to disable this option". There was one glaring mistake in setting the clock multiplier on the Durons; follow the instructions and you're setting your processor 100MHz above the right level! Use your common sense, when it tells you that 8.0 x 100MHz = 700MHz, well if you try it and smoke your processor you deserve it.
One thing this board has is the DIP switches to set the processor multiplier. That means you can overclock your processor seperate from changing the bus speed. To do this you need a processor that is unlocked, or you can modify any Socket A AMD processor to unlock it. Search the web for instructions how. The bus is also overclockable, but the 200MHz DDR bus is VERY sensitive, and usually can go no higher than 210-214MHz.
I have a Duron 700 and fully expect to hit higher than 900MHz once I get a decent heatsink. Remember that 900MHz with a 210MHz bus is usually better than 950MHz on a 200MHz bus; bus speed increases have a MUCH larger impact than processor increases.
Overall, this board is great. Very stable, was easy to setup, and the drivers are mature enough that there wasn't any strange problems. A few things to watch for though:
While the Promise IDE Ultra ATA/100 controller is onboard, think of it as an add-in card, with different drivers than your normal IDE controller. Windows 9x will run fine, and fast with updated drivers, but you will need the Promise drivers on a diskette if you are doing a clean install of Windows NT or Windows 2000. Otherwise you won't be able to see the hard drive to install the OS.
The main competiton for this board, the ABit KT7-RAID. It's more expensive, but gives you the option to have IDE RAID.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 175
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Epinions.com ID:
photon_7
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Location: Calgary, Alberta Canada
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 1 member
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