Asus A7V333 Manual
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Asus A7V333 Manual

Asus A7V333 Manual

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LOSTCIRCUITS
ASUS A7V333
Hit me with the voltage regulators ..
(Review by MS, April 24, 2002)
Summary
The launch of VIA's new KT333 chipset has spawned an avalanche of new board releases. Some of the new boards are mere
reiterations of KT266(A)-based boards, some others take over the outlines of existing concepts but have some deep modifications
under the hood. An example of the latter category is the ASUS A7V333 that looks similar to the earlier A7V266-E but is essentially a
completely new board under the cloak of superficial similarities. Changes include but are not limited to the new chipset revision and
additional interfaces as e.g. IEEE 1394 Firewire and Smart Media. Different logical addressing of the CPU configuration is one of the
changes brought to the table. For the consumer, the bigger question is whether the A7V333 is worth the upgrade from any existing
platform as well as whether there are any new bugs to watch out for. The answers are yes and yes ......
By now, it is a trivial fact that the Giga-Hertz race between Intel and AMD has raised the demands on the data accessibility, that is,
specifically, the memory interface. If PC2100 including some sophisticated prefetch mechanisms were still adequate for the
introduction of the Palominos to the desktop platform, those horses have gotten way faster and created new demands. The higher
multiplier values necessary to reach the next level of clock speed are more and more becoming what is known in optics as empty
SHORTCUTS:
Top Page
At One Glance
Features
Layout Ln-board
Peripherals
Jump, Jumper,
Jumperst
Dip Switch, Connectors
BIOS, Test
Configuration
SiSoft Sandra
Content Creation
WS2001, Expendable
Quake3 Arena, 3DMark
Overclocking,
Conclusion
Hot Offers for
the A7V333

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  • Page 1 KT266(A)-based boards, some others take over the outlines of existing concepts but have some deep modifications under the hood. An example of the latter category is the ASUS A7V333 that looks similar to the earlier A7V266-E but is essentially a completely new board under the cloak of superficial similarities.
  • Page 2 KT333A (chip markings CD and higher) and there are already a number of mainboards available sporting the newest core logic revision. We will have more on the different boards in the coming weeks, for now, we are going to start with the ASUS A7V333 => At One Glance =>...
  • Page 3 Jump, Jumper, Jumperst Dip Switch, Connectors BIOS, Test Configuration SiSoft Sandra Content Creation WS2001, Expendable ASUS A7V333 Quake3 Arena, 3DMark Hit me with the voltage regulators .. Overclocking, Conclusion Hot Offers for the A7V333 (Review by MS, April 24, 2002)

  • Page 4: Cpu Interface

    ASUS A7V333 VIA KT333 (KT333-VT8233), 5 PCI, Promise RAID 0,1, CMedia 6 channel sound, Onboard Firewire CPU interface Socket 462 for AMD Athlon (Thunderbird / Palomino / Duron) processors Chipset...

  • Page 5: System Memory

    VIA KT333 DDR chipset VIA KT333 (CE) North Bridge VIA VT8233 South Bridge VLink 266 MB/sec high speed interconnect FSB, Multiplier and Voltage Settings 1 MHz micro stepping in BIOS 100-230 MHz with automatic PCI divider adjustments from 1/3 to 1/5 as a function of FSB frequency Multiplier settings in BIOS (6-14 x) Vre: 1.675- 2.3V via jumpers, Default, +0.025 +0.05 in BIOS...

  • Page 6: Form Factor And Dimensions

    BIOS Award Medallion BIOS PC-99, PnP, ACPI, APM, DMI, Green support I/O Interface 2 x EIDE channels (up to four devices) PI/O mode 3,4,5, ATAPI, UDMA 33/66/100 2 x IDE RAID 1,0 channels (up to four devices) 1 x 3 mode floppy connnector 2 x UART 16550 COM ports 1 x SPP, EPP, ECP LPT port 1 x PS/2 mouse, ATX keyboard port...
  • Page 7 What you get ASUS has never been stingy about the bundle shipped with their mainboards and even though some of the stuff included was not as fancy as what some competitors offered, the included documentation, hardware and driver support was never anything short of exemplary.
  • Page 8 Quality We have said it before and we can only repeat it here again, so far, we have yet to find an issue with quality on any ASUS board that has gone through here. One of our criteria has always been the on-board power circuitry and the rule of thumb is that the more phases we have, the cleaner is the power and the faster the switching as we documented in numerous earlier reviews.

  • Page 9: General Disclaimer

    2 phase design is functionally roughly equivalent to a standard four-phase design. It certainly speaks for ASUS to see the OnSemi NCP5322A controller chip as the heart of the A7V333, providing a state of the art solution for fast and smooth power regulation.

  • Page 10: Overall Layout

    Overall Layout A direct comparison between the A7V333 and its predecessor A7V266-E shows a few similarities but also quite a few deviations of the new board from the older one. The most prominent change is the obliteration of active cooling of the North Bridge in favor of the same bulky passive heatsink that also decorates the A7M266D.
  • Page 11 VIA's own USB controller chip (VT6202) has rolled out a few weeks ago and will, by sheer convenience, replace the NEC IC on VIA chipset-based mainboards. The A7V333 is the first board where we see this particular on-board USB 2.0 interface but it'll move into the mainboard field very fast.
  • Page 12 Jump, Jumper, Jumperest Despite the fact that the A7V333, once it is up and running can be operated in jumper-free mode, the board features a gazillion of jumpers meant to enable / disable RAID, on-board sound, IEEE 1394 Firewire, USB and Keyboard Power-Up, the Secure Digital and...
  • Page 13 A small "Hors d'Oeuvre" of the jumper menu awaiting the un-expecting user of the A7V333: on the left are JP1 and JP2 to set the DDR voltages. "1" enables Power-On by USB 1 and 2, "2" and "3" are the line audio header jumpered to reroute the signals to the back panel jacks and the bass center setting, respectively.
  • Page 14 The latter two settings are almost guaranteed to destroy the memory modules, maybe not today but after a few weeks. It is not clear what the purpose of the high voltage settings is, however, it is only a matter of time until this will become a liability issue for ASUS, one way or another.

  • Page 15: Dip Switch

    Jump, Jumper, Jumperst Dip Switch, Connectors BIOS, Test Configuration SiSoft Sandra Content Creation WS2001, Expendable ASUS A7V333 Quake3 Arena, 3DMark Hit me with the voltage regulators .. Overclocking, Conclusion Hot Offers for the A7V333 (Review by MS, April 24, 2002) Dip Switch Above, we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable/ disable jumperless mode.
  • Page 16 Connectors The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors. We have the standard audio I/O connectors backed by two line-out / line-in headers, both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the I/O backpanel. A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 2.0 / 1.1 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX I/O...
  • Page 17 The main difference to any of the previous ASUS BIOS versions is the fact that something, somewhere must have gotten a bit out of hand. What I am referring to is the fact that the BIOS offers a ton of different settings to adjust the Input and output strobe delay (DQS) and similar parameters as S2K and DQS driving strength.

  • Page 18: Test Configuration

    The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre, 12V, 5V and 3.3V. Test Configuration Hardware ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (20.5GB)
  • Page 19 Jump, Jumper, Jumperst Dip Switch, Connectors BIOS, Test Configuration SiSoft Sandra Content Creation WS2001, Expendable ASUS A7V333 Quake3 Arena, 3DMark Hit me with the voltage regulators .. Overclocking, Conclusion Hot Offers for the A7V333 (Review by MS, April 24, 2002)
  • Page 20 SiSoft Sandra Memory Benchmark results depending on BIOS settings and memory frequency. All results were obtained using the "Optimized" setting unless indicated by "Turbo", all runs were done at 2:2:2, 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 4:5 (CPU : Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2.5:3:3, 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS.
  • Page 21 Buffering Disabled WIthout buffering, prefetching is disabled which means that there is no real data streaming possible, even though accesses can stay in page. This naturally reduces the overall bandwidth and consequently, the chipset and bus bottlenecks are no longer as limiting as they were in the streaming application.

  • Page 22: General Disclaimer

    SiSoft Sandra Memory Benchmark results with buffering disabled. Note that higher memory frequency gives better results than lower latencies, however, the difference is only marginal. Needless to point out that increasing the CPU bus frequency yields better gains than increasing the memory frequency.
  • Page 23 Jump, Jumper, Jumperst Dip Switch, Connectors BIOS, Test Configuration SiSoft Sandra Content Creation WS2001, Expendable ASUS A7V333 Quake3 Arena, 3DMark Hit me with the voltage regulators .. Overclocking, Conclusion Hot Offers for the A7V333 (Review by MS, April 24, 2002)
  • Page 24 To claim any difference here would be absurd. 3D Gaming A vintage benchmark but still very interesting in the context of memory performance is Expendable Timedemo which uses the execution of a script with intermittent reads and writes. In other words, the push-pull of the benchmark kind of prevents the accumulation of a data back-log in either direction and it is the combination of raw bandwidth and latencies that determines the outcome.
  • Page 25 Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it. These scores are nothing short of outstanding. => Quake3 Arena, 3DMark2001SE => next page: General disclaimer: This page only reflects the author's personal opinion and assumes no responsibility whatsoever regarding any of the contents or any damages that may occur explicitly or implicitly from reading the contents of this site.
  • Page 26 Jump, Jumper, Jumperst Dip Switch, Connectors BIOS, Test Configuration SiSoft Sandra Content Creation WS2001, Expendable ASUS A7V333 Quake3 Arena, 3DMark Hit me with the voltage regulators .. Overclocking, Conclusion Hot Offers for the A7V333 (Review by MS, April 24, 2002)
  • Page 27 We used the "Fastest" setting to keep the influence of the graphics card at a minimum. Again, it was possible to outperform the 166 MHz memory bus setting with low latency settings at the synchronous 133 MHz memory bus setting. Normal...
  • Page 28 Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results. 3DMark2001Se...
  • Page 29 3DMark2001SE appears to be very sensitive to latencies, that is only at the lowest latencies combined with the higher memory frequencies is there any advantage. => Overclocking, Conclusion => next page: General disclaimer: This page only reflects the author's personal opinion and assumes no responsibility whatsoever regarding any of the contents or any damages that may occur explicitly or implicitly from reading the contents of this site.
  • Page 30 Overclocking With predefined settings up to 230 MHz, one of our questions was whether in real life, the A7V333 would live up to the expectations set by the manual and the BIOS options, In short, we were not disappointed, since the A7V 333 actually exceeded our expectations by quite a margin.
  • Page 31 Conclusion The ASUS A7V333 is one of the first boards available with the VIA KT333 chipset. There is not much to say about the performance of the new chipset, essentially, there is not much of a difference between the KT266A and the KT333 chipset and from a technical standpoint, nothing much can happen anyway since, as explained earlier, the CPU bus reamins the bottleneck.
  • Page 32 ROMSIP could override any hardware settings including the cut bridges responsible for the multiplier, there would be no doubt that the A7V333 would be the one and only top choice for any tweaker. If further, the memory and core voltage settings were either better documented or else just within specs, the board would be even better.

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