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February 8, 2001
Summary
The ASUS A7V133, based on VIA's latest revision of the KT133(A) chipset specified to operate at FSB settings of 133 MHz and above is an excellent contender in the new top class of SDRAM compatible mainboards. Featuring a 2.1 GByte /second bandwith interface between CPU and North Bridge and an on-board UATA/100 RAID 0 controller the A7V133 has been built for high throughput of data from both mass storage and the DRAM interface. Five PCI slots with the capability of manual assignment of IRQs offer enough expandability combined with the convenience of manual solving of conflicts. The integrated VIA audio codec provides minimalist sound. In terms of performance, the A7V133 does not reach up to the DDR-based A7M266 however, offers the more economic solution for a high performance board with outstanding stability up to 152 MHz.
Part II of this article evaluates the difference between SDRAM and DDR by benching the ASUS A7V133 against the A7M266 using real world benchmarks. In office applications running mostly from the cache, little or no performance gain is observed, however, this changes as soon as the scope moves towards content creation. The highest performance increment is found in 3D applications, i.e., gaming.
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One of the bestselling boards in Socket462 design has been the ASUS A7V. There is hardly any introduction necessary since the board has made headlines all over the web and printed press. Meanwhile, however, the winds of trade have changed ever so slightly, that is DDR mainboards have not only been introduced on paper but are readily available in the store for both Intel PIII and AMD Athlon processors. Despite the availability of DDR, theoretical bandwidth and performance limitations as outlined here as well as the rejuvenation of the standard VIA KT133 chipset in form of the 133A revision have created a virtual fiasco (in the good sense) for the performance oriented consumer.
The knife in the back of the AMD DDR solutions (regardless of which chipset is used) turns out to be the long overdue VIA KT133A chipset running the FSB at 133 MHz clock /266 MHz data rate. Surprisingly, not only for the notorious overclocker who wants to push his locked CPU a bit higher but also for the strictly performance oriented end user, the new revision of the chipset offers quite a performance boost over its older brother, dispelling all speculations that the memory bus by itself was the only limiting factor in performance of the VIA KT133-based boards.
Armed with a higher bandwidth interface beween chipset and CPU, the latest VIA spawn shows that maybe DDR is not really necessary, at least at the moment. That is, a correctly implemented SDRAM interface combined with a high-speed DDR FSB could very well show that the anticipated real performance limitations of the older designs were set a bit too low. At the very least, it could be a heroic Swan Song, the last rearing of a dying breed (which, in the case of the SS7 platform, has extended by now over two years).
Under normal circumstances, I don't like comparisons, in this case, however, is it necessary and, further, since both boards used for the performance comparison are made by the same manufacturer, it is appropriate to bench them one against the other. The second contender in this case is the ASUS A7M266, however, before launching the deathmatch, allow me to introduce the ASUS A7V133 in more detail.
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