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With only two phases for the voltage regulators, how stable is the A7V8X going to be? Using the standard Taisol cooler we were able to overclock the XP2400+ (nominal core speed: 2.0 GHz) to 2.2 GHz, roughly equivalent to an XP 2700 without even touching the core voltage. Suffice it to say that the ASUS voltages are always a bit high but nonetheless, this is rather impressive. At 2205 MHz there everything was still running with the sole exception of 3DMark2001 that occasionally crashed, showing that we were pushing the limits of the board, chipset or CPU.

2.2 GHz or 10% overclock is pretty good considering that we did not even increase the core voltage

Conclusion

The VIA KT400 chipset is the first chipset to officially support 333 MHz FSB AMD processors, which raises the question when we are going to see this next generation of AMD CPUs entering the market. AGP8X at this time appears somewhat premature but in reality we are looking at a repetition of what happened when AGP X4 was first introduced. It will be some time until we see software, that is 3D applications that will be able to take full advantage of the new interface. Doom3 most likely will be one of these applications and if not, there will be others.

ASUS A7V8X

Within the scenario of VIA KT400 chipsets, the A7V8X is a fully loaded, high quality board featuring about anything that one might possibly want. The A7V8X proved exceptionally stable under even the most adverse conditions. The only criticism we have about the board itself is the lack of lower Vre voltage settings, since it appeared as if the CPU would have run happily even at 1.5V or below with the concurrent lower temperatures to make thermal management somewhat easier / less noisy. On the other hand, even though we did not test it ourselves, ASUS is believed to have the best COP (CPU Overheat Protection) in the field, paralleled only by Soltek

Serial ATA-150

We have been looking at a number of boards and their implementation of SATA in the last few weeks. Suffice it to say that the ASUS A7V8X is one of the boards that harmonizes best with the pure SATA technology offered by Seagate. Most other boards are using bridge solutions that simply serialize a parallel signal whereas the Promise PDC 20376 controller appears a true serial interface. We have looked at transfer rates on other boards and they were somewhat lower than what we see on the A7V8X (without pointing any fingers here).

DDR400

The one thing that is somewhat puzzling is that there is no performance gain whatsoever with moving from DDR 333 to DDR 400. It is not entirely clear what happens here, the chipset itself is running at the same speed at both memory settings, only the memory is running faster and even with the same latency settings, we still don't see any performance gain. As it turned out. we did, in fact, see a performance hit compared to the DDR 333 setting.

Regardless of the reasons for this conundrum, in all likelyhood, we will see AMD move to the 333 MHz FSB in the near future and in that case, running DDR in synchronous mode with the FSB without translators, fifos and synchronizers will most likely beat DDR 400 again, reason enough not to even offer this possibility. In that case, low latencies will be, once again, the trump card. Keep in mind here that CAS latency only plays a very subordinate role in DDR, it is tRCD that counts.

One thing, we can say, though, whatever will happen, the A7V8X is ready for it and most likely will play a very prominent role in the Socket A platform scenario.

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