Friday, August 11, 2000

Introduction

Today, it's a great pleasure for our site to finally be able to present a review of an Asus product.

Asus, one of the most prolific manufacturers on the market, has always offered a range of products so vast that few other manufacturers could seriously consider following their lead. Well known for its graphics cards, and motherboards, Asus also offers a range of multimedia products such as CD-ROM drives, DVD-ROM drives, etc. More to the point, though, it is largely thanks to our acquisition of a new processor that makes this particular review possible, and so you could largely categorize this as a "double feature" of sorts. The Asus A7V (which we're reviewing, of course :)) is in fact a Socket A board, featuring the Via KT-133 chipset - one of the new generation of boards capable of interfacing with the new AMD Athlon "Thunderbird", and Duron processors. Asides from being a prime method for testing our 1GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird, the A7V also includes a Promise Technologies controller that will allow upto 4 ATA100 drives to be installed. To put it bluntly, the features that have been packed into this board put it head & shoulders above its closest competitors, in terms of functionality. So how does it perform? Read on, and find out! :)

The KT-133

To start off, we'll go off on a bit of a tangent in order to introduce you to the new chipset that is at the heart of the A7V board. By implementing the KT-133, the A7V qualifies as a third-generation Athlon motherboard.
Still, not too much seems to differentiate this chipset from its predecessor - the KX-133 - which was widely implemented with the previous generation of Slot A Athlon logic boards. To put it short, the KT-133 is simply a KX-133 which has been adapted for the Socket A interface, and thus capable of supporting Athlon "Thunderbird", and Duron processors. Both of these chips sport an integrated Level 2 cache; something that the original Athlon's lacked. In fact, according to AMD and Via, of the two chipsets, the KT-133 alone uses new timings in such a way as to operate properly with the new CPUs. As a fact, the KT-133 uses the 8373 North Bridge instead of the to the 8371 of the KX-133 but these two components are nearly identical.

Thus, officially, the KX-133 is incompatible with Socket A chips. What's more, the Slot A rendition of the Thunderbird are only made available directly to OEMs, according to AMD. To make a long story short, the KT-133 bring no new features to the table that we haven't already seen with the KX-133 it replaces.

Next: The features