The first thing you notice about the CPU socket is the handle. Unlike a lot of socket 370 handles, the one used by Asus is not metal and it's closes below the level where the CPU mounts. This way you can put on a big PPGA cooler like those from Alpha or Global Win. This is a really nice touch and it's good to see the Asus engineers doing their home work. The motherboard had no problem accommodating my CPU and Golden Orb cooler.

Here you can see the board layout. In general, the layout is good. The placement of the power supply connector could have been done better. The motherboard is bigger than most, but it does complies to the ATX standard so you should have no problems installing it into any ATX case. The A7V has built in ATA100 support and therefore comes with an extra pair of IDE ports. This means you can hook up to eight IDE devices! You will also notice that the A7V doesn't have any ISA slots. 

The A7V uses a handy riser to keep those pesky electrolytic capacitors out of the way.  Gone are the problems with having to bend the risers to make room for that big Alpha or Global Win heatsink.  Also, unlike slot-based motherboards, you won't have any problems with the heatsink blocking any DIMM slots.

While the A7V BIOS does come with FSB adjustments, there are no multiplier adjustments. To adjust the multiplier you would need to use the motherboard jumpers. It's been a while since I adjusted CPU speed with jumpers and it's a shame that Asus couldn't do it in the BIOS, but this beats having no adjustments at all. If you decide to use the jumpers, you can no longer use the Soft FSB in the BIOS. The jumpers adjust the FSB, multiplier and voltage. 

Next page: Performance

[Page 1] [Page 2] [Page 3] [Page 4] [Page 5] [Page 6] [Home]