Conclusion

After releasing one of the most successful Irongate-based SlotA mainboards, ASUS has come up with another muscle board based on the VIA KX 133 chipset. The limitation in overclockability as a common thread running through all Athlon boards so far cannot be blamed on either chipset or mainboard manufacturer since it appears that it is simply a feature of the EV6 bus. The only criticism remaining in this regard concerns the selection of external CPU speed frequencies. We know that they know that we know (hehe) that they are aware of the inadequacy of the higher bus speed settings. Then why bother? A straightforward 1 MHz increment as realized in the K7M would have been much more proficient.

Compared to the K7M, ASUS has learned from some of the mistakes. The conflict between the ATX power connector and the requirement for cooling has been resolved by moving the connector block as far away as possible. All in all, the K7V is an excellent board with enough room to play around in the BIOS settings and excellent expandability. The worst aspects of the K7V in its present form are the BIOS layout and the presence of the AMR slot. An old fashioned ISA slot would offer quite a bit more, particularly in the domain of sound or modem, particularly in view of the fact that the story about ISA causing an overall performance hit turns more and more into what it really is: an unsubstantiated hype bare of any real world basis.

All in all, so far the K7V appears to be the best SlotA mainboard currently available. Where others give golden awards, we feel that this simple statement issued by LostCircuits suffices.

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