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Quality and Setup of the Asus A7V333 |
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whole lot going on under the hood |
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The A7V333 is chock
full of connectors, chips, and yes, even jumpers for
overclockers who want to set things up on the board
rather than use the BIOS. Sometimes this can be
preferred because if a setting is incorrect, simply
resetting the jumpers can provide a quick fix for a
system that will no longer boot.
In the
first corner of the board, we have the AGP slot and
five PCI slots. Placed on the edge of the board just
past the 5th PCI slot, are the CD and Aux-In audio
connectors. Along the edge of the board are the
connections for the Game Port and Smart Card reader,
and the floppy drive connector lies just past the PCI
slots.
On the AGP slot, you can notice a small, yellow
warning sticker. This warning mentions that only AGP
Pro (1.5V) cards are supported, and we needed to
remove a safety tab before installing. Personally, I
think the sticker should have sufficed, as it took me
a few minutes to get the tab out of the AGP slot. I
also would have liked to see a retention clip for the
AGP card to prevent the card from creeping out, a
problem which I encountered when first running some
benchmarks. Although the GF4 card was in just enough
to run Windows, whenver I launched a graphics
intensive program such as Quake 3 Arena, the machine
would simply lock up. It took some re-imaging of the
system, and installing and reinstalling drivers before
I realized that the back end of the card was sticking
ever so slightly. Finally, just past the AGP slot were
the firewire connection pins and extra fan headers.
In all three of the pictures you can see the light
blue box of switches, which can be used to manually
set the speed for the front side bus. While some
overclockers may prefer to make manual adjustments, I
would just as soon use the BIOS settings, as they
include more fine-tuning options than what can be done
here. You can also get a glance at the VT8233A
Southbridge, connections for the switches, plus a
number of jumpers. All total, there are more than 20
separate jumpers that can be used to enable or disable
certain hardware components on the board. Again, I
find it easier to use the settings in the BIOS rather
than take out the manual and hunt down each jumper to
disable a component.
Placed in the other corner you can also find the
connectors for a Secure Digital memory card or Memory
Stick reader, an additional USB 1.1 header for 2 more
ports, and a header for Asus IPanel owners, which is
an optional drive bay with front I/O ports and system
LEDs.
On the
other end of the board, you can see the CPU sockert,
KT333 Northbridge, and three DDR DIMM slots,
supporting up to 3GB of memory. The orientation of the
CPU socket is such that the larger heatsinks can be
installed without getting blocked by the power supply,
a problem that I ran into with my MSI K7T266 Pro 2-RU
motherboard. There also weren?t any nearby capacitors
to interfere with the heatsink/fan as well. This was
really good planning by Asus, and saves the user some
frustration when installing the larger HSFs that
Athlons require.
There is a large, passive heatsink over the
Northbridge that is held down by two clips. It might
have been nice to see a fan on the heatsink, but this
will do for now. What seems to be common these days is
the proximity of the 3 DIMM slots to the AGP slot.
What this means is that to switch out the RAM, one has
to remove the AGP card first. While this isn?t a huge
problem, I still can?t see why manufacturers can?t
move them just a bit further away from each other.
Finally we come upon the ATX connection and the IDE
ports. The two closest to the power connection are
standard IDE ports each supporting two Ultra DMA
133/100/66 devices. The other two are used for the
Promise RAID array, and can be used to support up to 4
more drives if need be. Having the ATX and IDE drive
connections all at the far end of the board is another
good layout choice as it keeps all of the cables away
from the CPU and HSF, allowing for better airflow.
Hidden close to here is the speech controller, seen as
the small DIP with the white sticker in the third
picture. This is what controls the POST Reporter and
can be enabled or disabled by the nearby jumper.
THE BIOS:
The BIOS
for the A7V333 is a CPU enthusiast?s delight. The main
screen is the usual fare where you can set the time,
date, and define the drives. Clicking on Advanced
brings up all of the settings for the CPU and RAM
timings, as well as the voltage settings. A lot of
these can be left to auto for now, but we?ll get back
to them in just a few seconds. Scrolling down to the
Chip Configuration option, it brings us to the
individual CAS and RAS settings for the RAM, and AGP
settings, such as the aperture size. Down further on
this page were a number of settings such as ?S2K
Strobe Control? and ?DQS Driving Strength?. While I am
all for options in the BIOS to let me fine tune my
machine, it would be nice if these are explained
somewhere. The manual does nothing but a brief mention
of the option and choices available, but fails to
mention what they actually do. The final two options
available are the Boot sequence, where you can alter
the boot sequence for up to four choices, and the
Hardware Monitor, which displays listings of the CPU
and motherboard temperatures, the voltage lines coming
in, and the fan speeds where applicable.
Back to
the CPU and RAM timings, the BIOS lets you fine tune
the FSB in +1 increments all the way up to 227MHz,
which is by far more than necessary, but nice to have
all the same. Alongside, you can see the breakdown of
the PCI bus relative to the new FSB setting. There is
also a full selection of CPU multipliers to choose
from. We normally would prefer to use an ?unlocked?
CPU for overclocking, so that we could adjust the
multiplier instead of the bus speed, and therefore
isolate and failed overclock speeds to either the CPU
or motherboard. The AMD AthlonXP 1800+ CPU I used,
however, was a retail version, so I had to settle for
raising the bus speeds only, which could cause other
components to interfere with the tests. I found that I
could get to 143MHz by stepping up 1Mhz at a time and
then testing the system by running benchmarks using
Quake 3 and 3DMark. While I could get Windows to boot
up correctly, Quake would crash back to the desktop,
washing-out the screen colors in the process. 3DMark
would not even launch at all, and eventually the
system would just lock up. Given Asus? reputation for
overclocking, I was hoping for better results than
these.
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