Review: Asus A7V333

The Asus A7V333 is very well made with plenty of add-ons options and jumpers. Whether everything they have decided to include is a good thing would be down to the individual. Personally I don't like onboard sound and think its a waste of time. Additionally so many jumpers on the motherboard is really not needed in a time of fully functional bug free jumperless motherboards. Why anyone would go to the effort of unscrewing their case and changing settings when you can do it from the BIOS I do not know.

The biggest let down with this motherboard is the lack of RAM voltage adjustment. This is a mistake by Asus, for a performance motherboard and some brands of PC2700 ram requiring more than standard voltages to run at full speed its a shame. So much PC2700 ram is not true PC2700 but rather hand picked PC2100 it quite often requires a bit of voltage bump. There was a reference at the beginning of the manual where they advertise the overclocking of this board and say:

"Easy Overclocking

• Adjustable Vcore Voltage and VIO"

This was the only reference I found to the VIO adjust. It definitly was not in the BIOS and if it was a jumper on the motherboard its location remains a mystery.

With the apparent lack of DDR voltage selection, this greatly reduces any overclocking potential. If a user wants to overclock and push the most out of their board you need to up the FSB to the very limits and the ram has to be able to take this. Because of the fact I had to reduce the FSB to actually make the computer run stable I didn't even attempt to do any overclocking as there was no where for me to take it. The biggest factor in the KT333 chipset over the previous AMD king KT266A is the memory bandwidth and the 1/5 divider. With the lack of memory voltage adjustment it has made this board useless to someone really looking for the top end benchmark score without some radical custom adjustments.

For all round performance and speed this motherboard is very good. The default scores are very high. The CPU protection functions are great ideas (although I was unwilling to risk killing a chip to test this). The graphics and memory performance at default speeds are very good and this can be seen by the excellent 3DMark2001SE score.

Overall the motherboard is well made, stable and comes with a whole host of options which would please the most picky of people. Unfortunately the lack of voltage control for the ram is a huge let down and makes the board not really useful for the overclocker. Generally the documentation was definitly above standard but except for a reference to a VIO adjust right in the introdcutory stages of the manual there is no further mention of any VIO.

Pros

• Huge range of functions

• Well made

• Hardware Bundle

• Overall default performance

Cons

• Lack of voltage adjustment for Ram

• Perhaps too many unneeded extras

• Too many jumpers

I would give this motherboard around 6 / 10. Great for the normal person not really into proper overclocking but just casual CPU tweakage. Maybe because personally I am looking for a high end performer that can get the absolute most out of my system its not for me. Any sort of VIO adjustment should be added into the BIOS if possible. If ASUS decide to add this in at a later date with a new revision of their BIOS then this board will be great.