BIOS

The K7V BIOS was written by Award and is an adaptation of the old Phoenix BIOS layout. The bad thing about it is that it is rather difficult to navigate and to find the entries hidden in submenus of submenus. The good thing is that this BIOS offers quite a few parameters to be modified, starting from the PCI latency to the DRAM read latch delay (0, 0.5, 1, 2ns) that need to be set to higher values in order to increase stability and performance under overclocking conditions.

Otherwise, it is a matter of taste whether one likes or dislikes the fact that almost every manipulation requires two steps, that is, to first select user defined over standard in order to gain access to e.g. external CPU speed.

Kudos to ASUS for abandoning the +33 description for the synchronous memory bus and instead using the terms 3:3 and 4:3 (memory bus, CPU bus). The choice of 3:3 instead of 1/1 is not exactly logical but as long as the meaning is obvious, one can hardly object.

Another noteworthy feature of the BIOS is its stubbornness when it comes to accept user-defined settings. That is, as a precautionary measure, the BIOS defaults back to standard settings as soon as there is a failure to boot. The only problem with that is that after saving the BIOS, the system very often refused to reboot, even with perfectly legitimate settings. The workaround in this case is to save the settings to CMOS and, immediately after the monitor powers off, to kill the power without allowing the system even to attempt a reboot. In many cases, this was the only way to change BIOS parameters that, on the next hard reboot, were found to work perfectly fine.

Setup

Out of the box, slap it in the case, run Windows setup and the computer is running perfectly fine. There were virtually no problems. The only thing requiring a bit more brain power is the fact that the drivers are not in the form of one of the VIA 4-in-1 packages but individual hand selected drivers that need to be installed in a specific sequence. A short description in the manual would be of invaluable help, at least for the novice.

The details of the system configuration were:

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