ASUS A7V133 Socket-A KT133A ATX

Showing the Improvements

As we mentioned before the A7V133 is equipped with a complete HSF unit on the 8363A North Bridge for better cooling.  Based on previous experience, this HSF unit is a specially designed one for better airflow.  As you can see from the pictures, one side of the fan unit is left open, so when the unit is working, the air is blowing towards the bottom left corner.  This way the heated air from the North Bridge would be blown towards the video card and the memory instead of the CPU, which may lower CPU temperatures slightly.  Unfortunately, ASUS did not put any thermal compound between the HSF unit and the North Bridge, something that all other manufacturers have done with the KT133A boards we have seen..

From CPU:  It is well covered.

From AGP slot: It is wide open

No thermal compound between the HSF unit and the North Bridge.

The A7V133, just like the A7V, uses the Award Medallion BIOS 6.00, which closely resembles an old Phoenix BIOS setup, except that it has more performance tweaking features, especially with regards to memory.  For the A7V133, there are quite a few tweaks you can do to the memory timing, including (but not limited to) CAS latency, RAS Recharge time, and RAS to CAS latency. 

There are a total of four fan headers on the board, one for the CPU HSF, one for the North Bridge HSF, and two extra headers for chassis fans.  Just like other ASUS motherboard, hardware monitoring is provided by a custom ASUS AS99127F ASIC that can monitor three temperatures, three fan speeds, and six voltages.

ASUS AS99127F ASIC.

The A7V was very highly recommended, partly because of its incredible stability.  If you recall, during our 24-hour Content Creation Winstone 2000 stress tests the A7V crashed a total of two times, which was very impressive since the normal crash rate was around five times.  For the A7V133, ASUS modified several things in order to keep up with the faster FSB speed.  For starters some of the traces have been changed in order to provide cleaner signals and sustain the faster speed.  On the other hand, besides the several 680uF and 820uF capacitors, ASUS also put in several larger 1500uF capacitors around the CPU socket, North Bridge, and DIMM slots. 

With these little adjustment, ASUS was able to make the A7V133 even more stable than the A7V.  Running at 133MHz FSB, the A7V didn’t crash once at all, matching the MSI K7T Turbo.  We continued the stress tests on the A7V133 and tried to see if it crashed within 48 hours, and it didn’t happen here either.  So in terms of stability, ASUS took yet another step , putting them neck and neck with MSI.

The A7V is equipped with the Promise Ultra ATA 100 controller, which provides two Ultra ATA 100 IDE channelsInstead of using the Promise PDC20265 chip on the A7V, ASUS chooses to use the Promise PDC20265R chip on the A7V133 as a second Ultra ATA 100 IDE controller.  The difference between the two chips is that the PDC20265R on the A7V133 supports RAID 0 configuration.  Interestingly, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1 are not supported on the A7V133, despite the fact that this chip does in fact support these modes on other motherboards.  Since the chip clearly supports the feature, it has probably been disabled in the BIOS, which means that we can hope for a future BIOS update to re-enable the feature. Also interesting is the fact that ASUS actually uses a jumper to select standard ATA 100 operation or RAID 0 operation - most other boards with the Promise controller handle all of this in the BIOS.  

Promise Ultra ATA 100 IDE RAID controller.

The ASUS manual is always famous for the amount and information included, and that unparalleled quality is carried on to the one included with the A7V133.  It includes virtually all the information you would need for the motherboard, including instructions on how to install the motherboard, details on all the BIOS settings, IRQ sharing, jumpers and connectors settings, BIOS flashing, drivers / utilities installation, and more.