The Candidate

The Specs

The Bundle

• 2 40-pin, 80-conductor ATA/100 cables, backward-compatible to all IDE devices
• Floppy cable
• 2-port USB connector
• Extra jumper caps
• Drivers/utilities/manual CD
• User's manual

The A7V133's support CD is very well done, and includes all the necessary drivers and a smattering of software; the ASUS PC Probe and BIOS Flash utilities are especially useful. The manual is informative as well, but I did find a few typos: at one point (p. 21) the default I/O Voltage is incorrectly listed as 3.56, and on page 20 the ATA/100 positions for jumpers 13 and 14 are listed as 1 & 2 and the RAID position as 2 & 3, while it actually is the other way around.

Extras

JumperFree Mode, Stepless frequency selection: This is the ASUS version of softmenu. When all the jumpers and DIP switches on the board are left in the same positions as when they left the factory, you can overclock the CPU in the BIOS. It allows for adjustments to the front side bus (FSB) or "system clock" from 100 to 166 in increments of one. If the famous L1 bridges on your AMD CPU are connected using graphite from a mechanical pencil, you can also adjust the CPU's multiplier, the multiplier times the FSB equaling the CPU speed. Therefore, you essentially have 3 methods of overclocking at your disposal: using the multiplier alone (leaving the FSB at default), using the FSB alone (leaving the multiplier at default), or using a combination of multiplier and FSB tweaks. Half of the fun of working with an AMD CPU is finding out how fast you can get using these three methods, and finding out which yields the best performance.

JumperFree mode also allows you to change the CPU's core voltage (or VCore), in 0.05V increments as high as 1.85v. You need this to give an overclocked CPU the extra juice it needs. You also may need to up the the I/O voltage (VI/O) slightly, but this cannot be done in the BIOS and requires a change via jumper.

686B South Bridge: This is the latest south bridge chip from VIA. It controls the PCI slots, using what VIA calls the "Super-I/O Integrated Peripheral Controller." The most important aspect of this chip is that it provides support for an extra 2 USB ports, as well as for ATA/100 (which its predecessor, the 686A, did not).

Promise RAID controller: You can install up to 8 IDE devices (either hard drives or ATAPI) on this motherboard. The capacity for extra devices comes from the PDC20265 chip by Promise that ASUS has put onboard. ATA/100 is supported by the Promise controller, but by changing a jumper from the "ATA100" position to "RAID," it also provides support for RAID 0. RAID 0 (as opposed to RAID 1, which backs up your hard drive) improves hard drive performance by splitting up the data between two drives, double-pipelining it back and forth.