Asus A7V8X: Closing in on Perfection

Asus have an excellent reputation for building fast and stable motherboards. In the past few years I have owned the CUSL2, A7V266E, A7A266, and the A7M266D. All 4 boards ran considerably beyond specification, and in that time never gave me any cause for concern. For example, the A7M266D is running my 2x XP1600+ at 153 Front Side Bus (FSB), and my CUSL2 used to push my P3 700E along at 150FSB. So you can see throughout my past I have had nothing but satisfaction from my Asus mainboards.

Asus once again adopts a new chipset, the KT400 and puts its reputation on the line. Will it provide the stability that is associated with Asus? Can the overclocker extract every last drop of power from his/her hardware? Thankfully in this review I can address the second question as well as the former. This time round I have an unlocked XP 2000+ to play around with. In the MSI KT400 Ultra test the XP2000+ was locked, so for the moment I cannot produce a direct performance shootout, which is a pity. I do include the results from the MSI KT4 Ultra for information purposes, but remember the boards are running at different speeds. We reviewers at amd3d.com have a XP2400+ Tbred, so keep an eye out for future updates where we can put both offerings through the same hoops.

Having an unlocked processor has given me the chance to push the FSB beyond specification and really test the RAM performance of the KT400 chipset. I can also see if I can get close to 200 FSB. When running at 200 FSB lets hope that sometime in the near future a 1/6 divider kicks in, as yet the current Asus bios (1006.001) does not support this. I am waiting for a response from Asus on whether this will require a bios update, or hardware change.

If you look back to our MSI KT4 Ultra review you will see the limitations of AMD’s CPU’s running at 133FSB (Bandwidth of 2.1Gb per sec). Running the RAM Asynchronously at DDR 333 and DDR 400 offered little performance increases. The good news is the XP 2700+. This will be AMD’s first chip that will officially support 166FSB ( Bandwidth of 2.7Gb per sec). Until that release we will have to make do with an unlocked XP 2000+.

Here's a more detailed look at the KT400 chipset. More information on the KT400 chipset can be found on VIA's website ... here.

This is our second KT400 based motherboard we have had to review. Both boards have an excellent hardware package, and at first impression they are very much alike. There are however some differences. We will look at those later on in the review. For now we will concentrate on the Asus A7V8X.

Does Serial ATA RAID interest you? How about USB 2.0, Gigabit NIC, 6 Channel Audio, Firewire, 8x AGP? On the software side you get C.O.P. (CPU Overheating Protection), and Q-Fan Control. With Q-Fan you can control the speed of your fans to suit your hardware spec. Very useful in the UK with the seasonal weather we have. Let’s get on with the review.