Written
: 1/30/2000
Written by:
MotoŽ
Price: $179
Asus K7M supplied by:
AMK Services
The Asus K7M is one of the very first overclockable Athlon
motherboards. With bus speed adjustments from 95Mhz all the way to 150Mhz, the
K7M should be able to push any Athlon processor to its limits.
The K7M is based on the
AMD-751 chipset and supports Athlons from 500 to 750+ MHz processors. This
new chipset is the first to incorporate a 200MHz FSB (Front Side Bus) in the x86
platforms. The K7M features support for UDMA/66 data transfer,
AMR slot, and JumperFree bus speed adjustment via the BIOS.
The motherboard ships with additional upgrades, including
two extra USB ports, PC Health Monitoring and Yamaha's awesome XG Audio built
in. The K7M meets PC99 standards by having color code input/output ports.
Besides the two USB ports on the motherboard, there is a bundled USB connector
set which will allow you to add two more USB ports. The connector set mounts on
a free PCI slot.
By far the most exciting feature on the K7M is its
softmenu type BIOS which allows you to set the bus speeds higher or lower than
stock. This allows for overclocking (or underclocking) of the Athlon processor,
which would otherwise require the use of a "Gold Finger Device" like the
Free Speed Pro.
There are two ways to adjust the bus speed of the K7M. You
can do it the old fashion way with jumpers or you can do it in software using
the BIOS. The jumpers are very limited. They only offer four bus speeds to chose
from. 100, 103, 105 and 110Mhz. The best way to overclock would be to use the
BIOS. Here you can chose 95Mhz, 100 - 125Mhz in 1Mhz steps, 133Mhz, 140Mhz and
150Mhz!
At this point you might be thinking "This doesn't make
sense. I thought the Athlon used a 200Mhz bus?" Well, yes and no. The Athlon FSB
runs at 100Mhz, not 200Mhz. The
EV6 bus transfers on both the rising and falling edges of the clock, so the
effective transfer rate over the EV6 bus is equal to a 200MHz FSB, but the
actual FSB frequency is still 100MHz.
The K7M comes with an onboard PCI Bus Master IDE
controller with two connectors that support four IDE devices on two channels.
The motherboard supports UltraDMA/66, UltraDMA/33, PIO Modes 3 & 4 and Bus
Master IDE DMA Mode 2, and Enhanced IDE devices, such as DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, CD-R/RW,
and LS-120, and Tape Backup drives
Being an overclocker's motherboard requires more than just
having a bunch of FSB adjustment. The motherboard should be able to adjust
voltage as well. The K7M has that covered too, but voltage adjustment is not
done in software but with jumpers. The voltage jumpers are located in a place
that is damn hard to get at. Good thing you don't have to adjust it that often.
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