Asus A7V333 Manual page 32

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more important one is that the KT333 embraces new technology which is necessary as a step towards the next platform. In addition,

the ball is really in the park of AMD at this point, VIA has successfully demonstrated that, similar to nVidia, they can deliver a chipset

that is capable of running in excess of 166 MHz, the DRAM industry has all the support in the world to back the high speed and only

AMD can't get off their (four letter word here) to subscribe to their original roadmap and take a small step in frequency that would be

a giant leap in performance.

It is sort of tempting to draw the analogy to the KX chipset for the Athlon and the asyncronous memory bus with its increase from 100

to 133 MHz that arguably showed some performance increase. One needs to bear in mind, though that in this case, the CPU bus

was running at 1600 MBps while the memory bus was increased from 800 to 1066 mbps, in other words, there was enough

headroom in the processor bus to capture any bit of performance enhancement brought out by the higher memory frequency. This,

however, is where the big difference is to the current layout since the memory data rates have more than doubled while the

processor bus bandwidth has remained where it was. From a performance standpoint, it is crucial to understand that the weakest link

in any chain will determine its strength and this is what we are looking at here, at least in streaming applications.

For the end user this means that in most cases, the best system performance will be achieved using the 1:1 ratio and the lowest

latencies. Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 5:4 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality

memory is used that allows to run at 2:2:2 timing settings. Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 2:2:2 at 133 /

266 MHz though and at that speed, the system will be faster than with a 166 MHz memory bus and higher latencies. In addition, most

older DIMMs will simply max out in 5:4 mode if the system is overclocked.

Theoretical performance considerations aside, the ASUS A7V333 is a piece of work by itself. If everything were working the way it

was supposed to be, that is the software 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. If there were no ifs,

there would be no reason to buy anything else and I wouldn't have to go to work anymore. Some of the ifs can be remedied very

easily, particularly the voltages, the ROMSIP may be somewhat more difficult but hey, we are only waiting......

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