Mobo Review
Written: Jan 11 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stability,5 PCI, Athlon, 3 DIMM, Size,
Cons: Not much
The Bottom Line: Get it!! Get it!! Get it!!
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| landenm's Full Review: ASUS VIA KT133 Chipset A7V133 (A7V133/550/SWA-UAY)... |
When is it time to upgrade? When you have a PII or less is what I would say. I am a conscious buyer when it comes to things over $20.00. After hours of endless searching, I finally decided on this one and it was a really good choice.
Hardware Specs
Processor
Socket A for AMD® AthlonTM / DuronTM 550MHz ~ 1.3GHz+ CPU
Chipset
VIA® KT133A and VIA® V82C686B
FSB
266/200 MHz
Memory
3 x DIMM Socket to Support Max. 1.5GB PC133/VC133 non-ECC SDRAM
Expansion Slots
1 x AGP Pro / AGP 4X
4 x PCI
1 x PCI/AMR Shared
VGA
AGP Pro/4X Slot
IDE Ports
2 x UltraDMA/100 (Promise® ATA-100)
Audio (Optional)
AC ' 97 Compliant Codec
Special Features
Power Loss Recovery, ASUS® JumperFreeTM, CPU Throttle, STR (Suspend-to-RAM), SFS (Stepless Frequency Selection)
Back Panel I/O Ports
2 x USB Ports
1 x Parallel Port (EPP, ECP), 2 x Serial Ports
1 x PS/2 Keyboard Port, 1 x PS/2 Mouse Port
1 x Game/MIDI (Optional)
1 x Audio I/O (Optional)
Onboard I/O Interface
One Header Supports Additional 2 USB Ports
20-pin ASUS® Panel
SIR (Integrated Serial Infrared)
Headphone
MIC
CD/AUX/Modem Audio In
CPU/Power Supply/Chassis Fan
ATX Power
IDE LED
BIOS
2Mb Award® BIOS, PnP, ACPI, SMBIOS 2.3, Trend® ChipAway Virus (TCAV), Green, Boot Block BIOS
Industrial Standard
PCI v2.2 and USB v1.1
Manageability
WfM 2.0, DMI 2.0, WOL, WOR, Chassis Intrusion, SMBus
Package Contents
User's Manual
UltraDMA/100 Cable x 1
IDE Cable x 1
Floppy Cable x 1
2-Ports USB Bracket x 1
Support CD
Board Size
ATX Form Factor: 9.6" x 12.0" (24.5cm x 30.5cm)
The Good
A7V133 seems to be equipped very well. It still comes with the ATA100 controller from Promise, which also allows you RAID level 0, although the 686B-southbridge supports ATA100 as well. Thus you can connect up to 8 ATA100 hard drives to this motherboard.
All CPU adjustments including multiplier, system speed (up to 166 MHz) and Vcore can either be done in the BIOS, or by using several dipswitches. I like the BIOS option because you don't even have to open up the case to overclock the CPU. The latter is basically interesting for system integrators who want to prevent users from changing important processor settings.
Asus ships an adapter for the two additional USB ports (a total of four). This comes in really handy when you have a camera, scanner, CF reader, PDA, and some other things. Just like the ABit KT7A, the VT8464 (the north bridge of the Apollo KT133A chipset) is cooled by a heat sink fan. You can find an AMR slot on the motherboard, which shares it's space with the fifth PCI slot. Thus you don't have to give up a PCI slot just due to the presence of the usually useless AMR interface, but you still have to pay for it. AMR (audio modem riser) is a cheap way to buy an audio card and modem in one. For people that really don't care about audio quality and don't use the internet very much, this option is good. For everybody else, it is useless.
The A7V133 comes with an AGP Pro connector, which has some more pins to ensure a proper power supply of high-end graphics cards. Three DIMM sockets will hold up to 1.5 GB of SDRAM memory. I just missed any note about ECC, which lets me suppose that this memory type is not supported.
The support from Asus is top of the line. I recently had to ship a motherboard, not mine, back to Asus and they were very expediant and polite. I like the tech support, although you get someone that speaks poor english every once and a while, that is becoming more and more common.
Overclocking is a piece of cake. I was able to get my CPU (750 Athlon) to run at 1Ghz all from messing with the Bios multiplier, and clock speed. It ran stable, even when I left it on doing video conversion for 38 hours straight.
The Bad
I didn't like the fact that they included an AMR slot in this board. I know ISA slots are becoming a thing of the past, but I had an ISA scanner I would have liked to use with this board. I couldn't so that kind of bummed me out, but that isn't to bad.
Other than some little insignifigant things, this board really doesn't have a lot of bad qualities.
Overall
This board is great!! I would buy it again if I had another choice. In fact I did buy another one and built my friend a new PC. A combination of good support, RAID, CPU support, 3 IDE slots, and many many more makes this board excellent. Even more you can get it for under 100.00 dollars now if you look on pricewatch.com!!!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 140
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Epinions.com ID:
landenm
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Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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