Print this article

Asus A7V133 Motherboard


Date
: 03/13/01 – 01:11:17 AM

Author
:

Category
: Motherboard

Manufacturer: Asus
Price: around $155

Thanks to MPL for supplying us with the Asus A7V133!

Introduction

As you already know, there’s a great competition going on on the KT133A motherboard market. We have MSI motherboards performing really nice in benchmarks and delivering outstanding stability to its users; and then we have the KT7A from ABIT, which comes out of most performance tests as an absolute winner with also offering all the stability & tweaking possibilities that users can dream off. Asus on the other hand has a reputation of producing motherboards which provide excellent stability (we can all agree on that, can’t we?) BUT cannot keep up with for example an ABIT mainboard in terms of overclocking & tweaking features. That’s why most hardcore overclockers (including me) probably didn’t choose to do it the Asus-way in the past. Just think about the KT7 vs. A7V battle; both great boards, but due to Asus’ lack of features, the ABIT KT7 nearly always won the KT133-battle.

Now things have changed with the introduction of the KT133A chipset a few months ago. Motherboards manufacturers jumped onto this KT133A chipset like flies on a pile of shit to provide their customers with the best possible KT133A-based mainboard. We’ve already had the ABIT KT7A-RAID on our testbed (read our review here) and today we’re going to take a look at what ASUS claims to be a marvelous KT133A mainboard, the A7V133. Can this board keep up with the highly tweakable ABIT KT7A motherboard? Does it deliver the same or even better stability as all other board from the Asus range? Is there enough space to mount a big ass cooler onto your CPU? etc. etc.

We hope all your question about this A7V133 motherboard will be answered in the following review… let’s continue with the specs!

Specifications

Here’s the A7V133′s entire spec list (copy / paste from the Asus website) :

Processor

Socket A for AMD AthlonTM / DuronTM 550MHz ~ 1GHz+ CPU

Chipset

VIA KT133A & 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/2X/1X 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

2Mbit Award BIOS with Full ACPI, DMI, Green, Boot Block, PnP, SM BIOS 2.3, Trend ChipAway Virus (TCAV) & Boot Block BIOS

Industrial Standard

PCI v2.2 and USB v1.1

Manageability

WfM 2.0, DMI 2.0, WOL, WOR, Chassis Intrusion, SM Bus

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)

There are two different versions of this board available on the market: one with onboard audio and one without this feature. You should decided for yourself which board corresponds best to you wishes, but bare in mind that this onboard audio only let’s you pay more $$$ and gives you no good sound quality in return. We reviewed the version without onboard audio.

Look! The sticker on the box says Promise ATA RAID

Now let’s discuss some specs in detail…

The Specs In Detail

If you read the specs, you’ll already know that the Asus A7V133 supports up to 1.5GB PC133/VC133 non-ECC SDRAM in 3 DIMM sockets right next to the CPU socket. And if I say ‘right next to the socket’, I don’t mean 1 cm further! (See for yourselves in the pictures below)

What you will notice immediately after you opened up the package of this A7V133, is the voltage riser card which is mounted vertically to the left of the CPU socket and behind the back panel of the board. This little card holds all of the capacitors and voltage regulators and allowed Asus engineers to place less capacitors onto the motherboard itself which creates much more space to mount a giagantic cooler onto your CPU. We’ve also found this riser card on the original A7V. In fact, the layout of the A7V133 is nearly the same as this of the A7V. Let’s think about the use of a Promise ATA100 chip that is used on both boards; only this time, the chip also and only supports RAID 0 configurations (the Highpoint ATA100 chips that ABIT uses on their boards also support RAID 1 en O+1).

Because the A7V133 uses the VIA 686B Southbridge, it now features native UDMA/100 support without even having to use the Promise ATA100 chip. And when the VIA 686B and the Promise ATA100 chip combine their power, they can support up to 8 simultanious UDMA/100 devices (!!)

The A7V133 has an AGP (Pro) slot,5 PCI slots, a shared AMR slot and the package also bundles a 2-port USB expansion card and a well-written manual.

You might have noticed on the pictures that the A7V133 has 2 DIP switches to the right of the DIMM sockets. We will go deeper into the use of these DIP switches and additional jumpers in our overclocking section.

Overclocking

On jumperfree setting, you can adjust the clock multiplier, FSB speed and CPU voltage from within the A7V133′s BIOS; the FSB can be upped from 100 to 166 Mhz (200 to 332MHz DDR) in 1MHz increments (90 & 95MHz is also possible). I also promised to tell you something about the 2 DIP switches on the board, well, here it goes. If we pay some more attention to the PCB of the board, we can clearly see the DIP switch tables with the combination settings to adjust the multiplier and the FSB speed (On Jumper Mode, the FSB speed is limited to 100MHz, 103MHz, 105MHz, 110MHz or 133MHz). ASUS also included the necessary tables to adjust the core voltage (1.10v – 1.85v), I/O voltage (3.3v – 3.45v – 3.56v) and to enable/disable the RAID function by jumpers.

I was able to push my Duron 850 past the 1.1GHz speedmark by using the GlobalWin FOP38 as cooler. After some experimenting with the FSB speeds and multipliers and a voltage limit of 1.850v, I found a multiplier of 7.5x and a FSB of 148MHz to be the optimal setting. This results in a CPU speed of 1110MHz which isn’t bad at all for a $100 CPU.

Benchmarking

System setup

- AOpen HQ45 case
- Asus A7V133 / Asus A7M266 / Abit KT7A-RAID (reviewed here)
- GlobalWin FOP38 cooler
- AMD Duron 850
- 128MB OCZ Value SDRam
- Western Digital UDMA100 45GB 7200RPM hard drive
- Creative Annihilator Pro (GeForce 256 DDR not overclocked)
- Win2k + SP1
- DirectX 8a + Detonator 6.50 + VIA 4.25a

All the testing was done using a Duron 850 @ 1GHz because this way we can compare my results with some benchmark results from the ABIT KT7A-RAID and the ASUS A7M266 DDR mainboard we reviewed earlier. (We used a Duron 800 @ 1GHz on the A7M266!)

Sisoft Sandra 2001 Pro

The Asus A7V133 beats the Abit KT7A-RAID in all the Sisoft Sandra 2001 tests we ran, also in the memory benchmark! I found this to be very amazing considering the great amount of tweaks on the KT7A-RAID. Hard to believe, but tests don’t lie!

CPU Mark 99

FPU Mark 99

Well well well, what do we see here?! The KT7A-RAID loses again. I still find it hard to believe that a board like the Asus A7V133 can perform better than a highly tweakable KT7A, although ‘better’ is a great word on the Ziff Davis tests; let’s say both mainboards perform on the par!

Quake 3 Arena 1.27h beta Timedemo 1

Like always…. One test, one result here: Quake 3′s timedemo 1 @ 640×480 / 16-bit to make sure the videocard isn’t messing up our results.
The result : 122,6 FPS. This is only 6 frames per second slower than the 128,1 FPS that I get on my KT7A-RAID. Yes yes KT7A lovers, the A7V133 loses in the Q3A test… but it stays well within visible range of the KT7A!

Good

- Onboard UDMA100 support (VIA 686B)
- Promise RAID support
- 150% stable (even when overclocked)
- Overclocks smoothly
- Outstanding Performance
- Full Jumperfree mode
- Enough space around the CPU Socket

Bad

- ONLY RAID 0 support
- No ISA slot & only 5 PCIs slots
- Promise IDE can’t be used together with large AGP card!

Conclusion

The Asus A7V133 is a great KT133A motherboard. Our tests have proven that this board can compete with the best KT133A mainboards on the market today! I wonder if the A7V133 isn’t ‘the’ best KT133A board out there at the moment?! Some will say it is while others will say this board stinks. I ran over all the benchmarks a couple of times to make sure I was seeing things straight. I even asked my girlfriend to read over the benchmark results, because I just couldn’t believe that the A7V133 had beaten my reliable KT7A-RAID… and once more I have to admit it’s true folks! That’s the main reason why I can highly recommand this board to everyone who asks me which KT133A based mainboard to buy!