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On-Board Sound
There are three main points of criticism with respect to the integrated AC97 sound. Disabling it in the BIOS will not prevent it's detection by operating systems other than Win9x. Resource and CPU cycle hogging of the device cause a severe system performance penalty. Last not least, the sound quality, according to my friend Paul, the AC97 qualifies as onboard noisemaker rather than sound device.
Point 3 has a lot of truth to it, for anyone intending to use the AC97, it is not worth to spend more than $5 on a pair of garden variety speakers.
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Point 1 is relatively unimportant at this point because the A7VI-VM is a mainstream product geared solely towards the Win9x user. Still, there is the problem that Microsoft is moving everything to abandon Windows 9x in favor of more advanced and costly operating systems. However, by the time the new versions will come out (even if it is as soon as 6 months from now), the A7VI-VM will be obsolete anyway.
Point 2, the performance hit is negligible. There is already such a humongous bottleneck in the graphics performance that adding the AC97 will just keep the CPU a bit more occupied instead of waiting half of the time for the graphics engine to catch up. Again, who cares, the board is not targeted towards the serious gamer anyway.
Conclusion
The A7VI-VM is not a high-end board, but that doesn't mean that is lacks quality or that it is a bad performer. The board is not geared towards the gaming community but towards the standard office user who wants to upgrade from his or her Pentium166 and spend as little as possible money on the upgrade but still be able to take advantage of the low prices of GHz CPUs. There are many reasons for this path, video editing, which does not require elaborate 3D capabilities, MP3 encoding, which does not require elaborate 3D capabilities, surfing the web, which does not require elaborate 3D capabilities, DVD replay, which does not require elaborate 3D capabilities, 3D design of objects using Amorphium, which does not require elaborate 3D capabilities (but wait, that is not really true anymore, hehe)
It is not a bad board, the A7VI-VM but it is not exactly where we would like to see the integrated boards to surface. A few months back, we conducted an internal market research survey and the outcome was that integrated boards would be well received even in the hardcore gaming community as long as they were really integrated, that is, as small as possible, featuring integrated LAN controller and firewire interface as well as some decent sound. To the rescue of the A7VI-VM, it needs to be said that, at least the manual features the integrated LAN controller and the Creative audio chip. If these two options were present on the board, it would be much more appealing. In the present form it does raise concerns about fitting all cards needed for the configuration of a really functional system.
The A7VI-VM takes one step in the right direction and is certainly a recommendable board but it does not go all the way. It is a good product for anyone who likes this kind of solution, particular Kudos go to ASUS for throwing out the ridiculous AMR slot and offering the third PCI slot instead. All in all, yes, I would get the A7VI-VM for my mother or as a secondary system but, for my own purposes, it does not offer much performance edge over the HOT 603 I am currently using, so I guess for now, I would skip it for myself.
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