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ASUS has never been stingy about the bundle shipped with their mainboards and even though some of the stuff included was not as fancy as what some competitors offered, the included documentation, hardware and driver support was never anything short of exemplary. Along this tradition are the features of the A7V333, there are some old acquaintances as the custom tailored I/O shield which is needed since the ATX I/O connector block is non-standard. Standard features also include the manual and install CD along with the little bag with extra jumpers and two 80 ribbon UATA cables and the mandatory floppy cable. Here it is, though where the standard features end. In terms of documentation, ASUS has added a Quick Reference Card that, at one glance, shows the A7V333 by numbers. Unfortunately, though, there is no legend to explain the numbers, a small but potentially painful and at least puzzling omission. Another quick setup guide in a gazillion of languages makes sure that worldwide distribution of the board is not hindered by language barriers.

The ATX I/O connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 2.0 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface.

In terms of additional hardware, the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 2.0 bracket, which further sports the game port missing in the I/O panel. Moreover, ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket, certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world.

The manual is typical ASUS quality, well organized and to the point, even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable. Interestingly, the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all. One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions / errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors.

We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example: Overclocking the processor is not recommended. It may result in a slower speed.

In the BIOS section, the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F. We won't hold this against ASUS, though, for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto.

Quality

We have said it before and we can only repeat it here again, so far, we have yet to find an issue with quality on any ASUS board that has gone through here. One of our criteria has always been the on-board power circuitry and the rule of thumb is that the more phases we have, the cleaner is the power and the faster the switching as we documented in numerous earlier reviews. However, there are also design differences that come into play, in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels, that is, the main controller signaling to the driver chips which, in turn, drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs. So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech. With three phases, this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs. However, the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical levels. The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics, meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster.

A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC, a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors. The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively, the integrated 2 phase design is functionally roughly equivalent to a standard four-phase design. It certainly speaks for ASUS to see the OnSemi NCP5322A controller chip as the heart of the A7V333, providing a state of the art solution for fast and smooth power regulation.

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