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L O S T C I R C U I T S

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ASUS A7V133 (VIA KT133A Chipset)

DDR for Breakfast? (Review by MS)

What you get

The A7V ships with the standard components, that is, the floppy connector cable, the 80 wire UATA / IDE cable, a bag of spare jumpers and the additional 2 port USB connector set. I am still wondering why other manufacturers cannot include the same in their shipping contents. Having the headers and not being able to use them doesn't make much sense, doesn't it. The manual is, as always, very elaborate without being too redundant and even contains interesting information on BIOS settings like System Performance Setting, even though some of this doesn't make too much sense. In addition, there are a few misleading numberings of jumpers, e.g. the UATA / RAID (JP13-JP14) conflicts with 13-14 (Wake-On-Ring and on-board fan connectors).

The CD included is identical to the one shipped with the A7M266 but, courtesy of the mainboard information and identification program, the correct install files are loaded and displayed. That is, at least in theory, however, I did run into the problem that the CD was not read by the A7V. Actually, every access of the CD caused the system to crash. Under normal circumstances I would have disregarded these events, however, both CDs showed the exact same behavior in that it was these CDs and these CDs only on this particular system that caused the hang-ups. Further, over the past week I have come across several threads of people claiming to have received coasters with the A7V133. Needless to say that both CDs worked flawlessly on any other system tested, even correctly identified the HOT603. The workaround was to copy the necessary files on one of the other systems and transfer them via network but not everyone is in this situation. Alternatively, the drivers can be downloaded from the web. I don't want to stress this issue it is almost negligible but it is something that can throw you off.

Quality

I have not seen a low quality ASUS product yet and the A7V133 is no exception. High quality Nichicon capacitors for noise filtering and Texas Instruments bus driver chips rank very high on the quality scale. The overall finish of the board itself is immaculate.

Layout

Not much has changed from the original A7V to the A7V133 revision. The A7V133 features the same 1/5/1 (AMR/PCI/AGP) layout as the older revision including the riser on the main PCB to accommodate the 2 phase voltage regulator circuitry. The most obvious revision is the inclusion of a massive heatsink / fan combo with its own monitored power header to the chipset. Otherwise, the capacitor configuration has been substantially revamped to achieve more efficient noise suppression. The key players in the capacitor roulette are easily identified by the brand name Nichicon and are, not surprisingly, scattered around the North Bridge.

Where one of the fortes of the original A7V were the 7 USB ports, courtesy of the Alcor USB router, the A7V133 lacks this feature altogether and, consequently, the number of USB ports is reduced to 4 channels, all governed by the 696B Bouth Bridge. The onboard PDC20265R Promise chip supports only RAID Mode0, that is, striping. Like most of the current ASUS boards, the A7V133 features the AGP Pro slot with the additional voltage pins to be used in future AGP cards.

=> connectors, jumpers, dipswitches =>

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