Asus A7V any problems? your thoughts.

[CoolDude365]

Hey, well now that im part of HU, im gonna need a decent system to benchmark on, this is what I had in mind.

Asus A7V
T-bird 700
128mb PC100

Does this setup sound ok to you guys? Have you guys had any problems with the asus atv? I have heard that the latest bios update, lets you set the multiplier and fsb, rather then using jumpers, is this true? Basically just give me your opinion on this mobo! Thanks.

 

[Phuz]

Hola.

The A7V is a great board, but can require some patience to get running perfectly.
As long as you install the newest VIA drivers, your system will be fine with that motherboard.
FSB settings in the newest bios is true also.

 

[andri]

Well, getting system stable on A7V wasn't a piece of cake but when all is done it simply rocks.

 

[pillage2001]

Patience is all you need to get it running stable. IF you want it to be good and hassle free, do not play with the BIOS settings.

 

[Mem]

You might be better of with the MSI K7T PR02A, this board is excellent in all departments.

 

[Gogga]

The Asus A7V requires a lot of patience to set it up. It took me about a month before I finally had a rock solid system! I am very happy with the board now, but I would still recommend a MSI K7T Pro2A over it.

 

[SilencerAZ]

Ouch ... a month

I found the trick to be mostly due to the hard drive controllers. I put only hard drives on the Promise Ultra100 controller. For the onboard IDE, where I had a CDROM, CDRW, and a ZIP100 hooked up, I found out that if I set them to AUTO that I would get random freezes, mostly when opening My Computer or anything that attempts to browse the drive (ie windows explorer). I changed it from AUTO to CDROM and manually set both drives up, for the ZIP, I had to set it to NONE, the OS sees it fine still. Once I did this the system is rock stable. I'm using 1004D bios by the way.

The only other issue I had was with the sound card, I had a Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla, which is based on the Aureal Vortex 2 chip. This chip has major compatibility problems with VIA chipsets, that's why I returned it and got a Live! Another thing that helped was disabling anything you don't use, I have no USB devices, and I don't use any COM ports, by disabling all these, that gives 2 IRQ's back, and the USB won't be sharing with anything that might cause a conflict.