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The drive connectors are in the upper half of the PCB at the right edge with the floppy connector towards the PCB edge. Instead of having two additional IDE connectors, the A7V8X only features a single extra connector for parallel drives, however, has two connectors for Serial ATA150.

The Promise PDC 20376 controller drives the single PATA connector where P stands for parallel as well as two serial connectors. The parallel (standard) ATA connector is angled at 90 degrees which makes it very easy to run off the cable off the mainboard without being anywhere in the way. The two SATA150 connectors show their typical staggered pin configuration for future hot-plugging of HDDs.

Shown in the picture above is also the green standby power LED. The A7V8X further features the AGP compatibility warning LED, that is, in case anyone attempts to power up the board using one of the older 3.3V AGP adapters that may be incorrectly keyed, the board will not initialize but the red LED will signal the incorrect voltage of the graphics adapter.

Jumpers and Dip Switches

Almost a trademark of ASUS boards in the past 2 years has been the presence of one or even two dip switches on the board. The A7V8X breaks with this tradition meaning that anybody used to the hard settings on the board will be somewhat disappointed. Quite honestly, though, we did not miss the switch one bit. Another victim of this development is the omission of the JEN (Jumperless Mode Enable) jumper.

Overvoltage

The board still features jumpers, though and in this case, the presence of jumpers as opposed to add the respective features to the soft-menu is rather justified. Jumpered features include the Keyboard power-up and USB device wake-up, the latter require a minimum of 2A to the +5V line in standby mode, though. More interesting to the overclocking community is the Vcore overvoltage jumper at the left upper edge of the PCB that shifts the available voltage settings of the board from 1.5V-1.85V to 1.7V to 2.05. Unfortunately, available voltage settings are dependent on the CPU stepping and speed grade as well and will not allow any settings below the nominal core voltage. That is, with an Athlon XP 2400+, the lowest voltage setting will be 1.65 which results in 1.7V even though we found that on other boards, the same CPU runs at 1.5V and much cooler and more stable under full load because of less thermal issues.

Basically, what it comes down to is that it is time to rethink some of the strategies. That is high voltages are not always what is needed. Granted, for the extreme overclocker using chilling instead of cooling, increased Vre settings may have some benefits, for the rest of the world, it is pretty much a useless feature, regardless of the current grain of wisdom.

CLRTC1

The oldest jumper in the world is probably the Clear RTC RAM (real time clock memory) where RTC stands for CMOS settings. In addition to the standard shorting of the two pins, the manual actually recommends the correct procedure which consists of unplugging the power cord and removing the battery while shorting the jumper to pins 1-2. Please be aware of the fact that this is the only correct procedure, except that the removal of the battery can be mimicked by pressing the power button repeatedly. A big Heads-Up for including the entire procedure in the manual.

ROMSIP

We looked at the ROMSIP jumper in the past, we asked ASUS about the functional role of this jumper and we got replies that we can't explain to our readers because we did not understand them. Moreover, every manual has a different explanation regarding the functionality and benefits of this jumper. In other words, we are clueless after all.

WPCI_USB

Setting the jumper from 5-6 to 1-2 enables the ASUS wireless card as opposed standard PCI functionality at default setting. We did not have the wireless card for testing so we have to take the statements in the manual at face value.

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