Asus A7V review (or is it preview?)

[KoK_Thunder]

http://www.aceshardware.com/#N5000273. This board is looking very promising to me. It has the BIOS adjustable overclockability (did anyone ever doubt AMD would forget us overclockers?), and in the article it says up to 1.5 Gbs of ram. 7 USB ports and AGP Pro. hmmmm. Go Asus!

 

[da loser]

cool. but what does this mean?

Athlon/Duron CPUs will be burned out within 10 seconds if you don?t provide proper or efficient heat dissipation method

hehe, sounds very scary.

Those bastards just trying to look like they have more features, damn PR people.

 

[KoK_Thunder]

I think it is saying "You MUST use our heat detection stuff it mentions lower in the article" or something like that

 

[Ulysses]

This is old but encouraging news. The question still remaining is whether production boards will really have a CPU multiplier adjustment feature of some sort (in the pic that's the 6-dipswitch blue box below the DIMM connectors. More and more the answer seems to be yes.

See more but conflicting pics at:
http://www.pcnews.com.hk/mobo/a7v/index.php3

 

[da loser]

weird, if you try and take the hk part out of the link, it goes to cnet but the page is missing.

[edit]ok, i'm going to stop posting now, www.pcnews.com is just linked to cnet.

 

[amphefreak]

Does it have integrated sound?

 

[bizkit]

I believe there is going to be a version without audio....

They always seem to to that!

 

[KoK_Thunder]

The reason I posted this is because I have found Aceshardware to be extremely reliable. I have never heard false information from them(except for the K6-2+ and K6-3+, which was a misunderstanding). Also it seems that board is a final production true blue you can buy it and use it soon board.

 

[HepDude]

Is there actually any real (ie significant, not something like 1.1%) improvement to having the Promise ATA100 controller onboard, as opposed to having a PCI card Promise ATA100 controller?

For example, an MSI K7TPro motherboard has 6 PCI slots, so after installing a Promise Ultra100 card, you have 5 open PCI slots, same as on the A7V - and the rumored extra cost of the A7V with the Promise ATA100 controller is roughly equivalent to the $35-$40 that the Promise Ultra100 PCI card costs.

 

[dszd0g]

KoK_Thunder, I don't see anywhere in that article that says the overclocking is in the BIOS. Actually, the picture shows the DIP switches as Ulysses pointed out. The rumor is the prerelease boards had the DIP switches and the production boards are going to have it in the BIOS. I want to see a final review. They also failed to mention the highest voltage their board could do. I remember seeing somewhere that the highest voltage their prerelease board could do is 1.8V which wasn't all that useful for overclocking Thunderbirds.

 

[Ulysses]

This page
http://www.asus.com.tw/products/motherboard/socketa/a7v/jumper.html
shows it tops out at 1.825 or 1.850 volts, depending on the CPU.

Tbird stock is 1.7 ; Duron is 1.5.

 

[HepDude]

- * ETA 07/12 * -

 

[cdrakejr]

If you haven't seen them yet, check out the two posts on:

http://www.insanehardware.com

ASUS A7V and Abit K7V both to have cpu multiplier. K7V in SoftBios, doesn't say bios or dipswitch for A7V.

 

[dszd0g]

Ulysses, yeah. Personally if I was running a T-bird I would probably push it up to 1.90V if I read it could handle it and my mobo could do it and assuming it helped me hit a higher clockspeed. So if I was looking for a mobo to overclock a T-bird I would look for one that could do at least 1.90V. Even if it does go up to 1.85V, the extra .5V could mean 100Mhz if its like the Coppermine or the Celeron 2.

 

[Ulysses]

Burn, baby, burn !!!