Monday, December 02, 2002

Introduction

The Asus A7V8X represents the bleeding edge of AMD Athlon motherboard technology.

First and foremost, it is based on the VIA KT400 chipset. That means it comes with built-in support for 8X AGP, Serial ATA150, ATA133, and DDR400 memory -- a long leap up from the KT400's predecessor, the KT333.

To differentiate itself from competing KT400 boards, the A7V8X is also sold with an optional 100Base-T network controller, but that's not all. The A7V8X also comes with several integrated Asus technologies, such as Asus C.O.P, Q-Fan, MyLogo2, and more.

And just to be thorough, Asus also keeps both a six-channel sound-card, and a RAID controller available as options.

Let's take a closer look.

Audio

The Asus A7V8X's audio circuitry is based around a Realtek ALC650 sound-chip. The ALC650 supports AC3, and 5.1 Surround Sound, and allows users to hook-in up to six audio channels, including a center base channel.

From a fidelity standpoint, the Realtek AL650 is quite good at what it does, and should satisfy most users.

SPDIF connectors are available as options.

Configuration

The ASUS A7V8X only includes a few jumpers in its design, but none of them is essential to the basic set-up process. The only one that may be of immediate use is only used to change the available range of CPU voltages to 1.7v-to-2.05v, instead of 1.75v-to-1.85v.

In other words, once the board is installed in a case, configuration is simply a matter of dropping into the BIOS.

Once there, users will be most interested in the "Advanced Chipset Setup" menu, from which they may set the FSB frequency to between 100Mhz and 227Mhz in steps of 1MHz, or allow the system to determine the frequency automatically.

The clock multiplier value can also be manually set to a value ranging from 5X to 22.5X.

Next, we have various component speeds and voltages. The memory bus can be set to 266MHz, 333MHz, or 400MHz, AGP/PCI ratio can be tweaked, the Vcore voltage can be set to between 1.75 and 1.85 Volts), the DDR voltage to between 2.55 and 2.85 Volts, and the AGP voltage to between 1.5 and 1.8 Volts.

Finally, users also have the option to tweak a variety of minor memory timing settings.

Next: Technical details.

Asus A7V8X