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With predefined settings up to 230 MHz, one of our questions was whether in real life, the A7V333 would live up to the expectations set by the manual and the BIOS options, In short, we were not disappointed, since the A7V 333 actually exceeded our expectations by quite a margin. We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 2:2:2, 6T and 1T CMD rate. Interestingly, relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system, thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time.

Saving the best for last, this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth). The score was obtained at 180 MHz, 1:1 ratio, 2:2:2 6T 1T Enabled using an unlocked MP 1200 Processor, buffering enabled, to avoid any misunderstanding.

Conclusion

The ASUS A7V333 is one of the first boards available with the VIA KT333 chipset. There is not much to say about the performance of the new chipset, essentially, there is not much of a difference between the KT266A and the KT333 chipset and from a technical standpoint, nothing much can happen anyway since, as explained earlier, the CPU bus reamins the bottleneck. One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way, probably, the more important one is that the KT333 embraces new technology which is necessary as a step towards the next platform. In addition, the ball is really in the park of AMD at this point, VIA has successfully demonstrated that, similar to nVidia, they can deliver a chipset that is capable of running in excess of 166 MHz, the DRAM industry has all the support in the world to back the high speed and only AMD can't get off their (four letter word here) to subscribe to their original roadmap and take a small step in frequency that would be a giant leap in performance.

It is sort of tempting to draw the analogy to the KX chipset for the Athlon and the asyncronous memory bus with its increase from 100 to 133 MHz that arguably showed some performance increase. One needs to bear in mind, though that in this case, the CPU bus was running at 1600 MBps while the memory bus was increased from 800 to 1066 mbps, in other words, there was enough headroom in the processor bus to capture any bit of performance enhancement brought out by the higher memory frequency. This, however, is where the big difference is to the current layout since the memory data rates have more than doubled while the processor bus bandwidth has remained where it was. From a performance standpoint, it is crucial to understand that the weakest link in any chain will determine its strength and this is what we are looking at here, at least in streaming applications.

For the end user this means that in most cases, the best system performance will be achieved using the 1:1 ratio and the lowest latencies. Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 5:4 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 2:2:2 timing settings. Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 2:2:2 at 133 / 266 MHz though and at that speed, the system will be faster than with a 166 MHz memory bus and higher latencies. In addition, most older DIMMs will simply max out in 5:4 mode if the system is overclocked.

Theoretical performance considerations aside, the ASUS A7V333 is a piece of work by itself. If everything were working the way it was supposed to be, that is the software ROMSIP could override any hardware settings including the cut bridges responsible for the multiplier, there would be no doubt that the A7V333 would be the one and only top choice for any tweaker. If further, the memory and core voltage settings were either better documented or else just within specs, the board would be even better. If there were no ifs, there would be no reason to buy anything else and I wouldn't have to go to work anymore. Some of the ifs can be remedied very easily, particularly the voltages, the ROMSIP may be somewhat more difficult but hey, we are only waiting......

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