Abit or Asus

From personal preference, Asus.

Rob
Please visit <b><A HREF="http://www.ncix.com/shop/index.cfm?affiliateid=319048" target="_new">http://www.ncix.com/shop/index.cfm?affiliateid=319048</A></b>

I've built both, and both were great.

In my home system now though, I'm using the abit kt7a-raid.

So i guess that tells you what I think.
Lotsa neat tweaks in the bios.

Altough I think I woulda been 100% happy with the a7v133 as well.

hope that helps

I wish I had a signature.

I have the ASUS A7V133.I like it very well Only problems I ever seem to have are self induced. Imagine that!!!

OK new messing around and stuffs- so here's my new take
ASUS-performs the best and fastest over all, but differences are small generally.
ABIT-I love this BIOS, the easiest overclock ever. What I would get for the less experienced user.
AOPEN-To throw this in there, performs a little better than the abit generally and a little worse than the asus. It has an excellent user friendly bios but not quite as cool as the abit softmenu, but close. Basically it is the near perfect blend of the two. My brother just got one to try it out and after running benchmarks and over clocking it's really great. It's also black which is better than cool. My new choice over all is AOPEN.
If you don't mind moving jumpers and stuff though, then ASUS is great too. Really you can't go wrong with any of the three though.

My Jesus is whiter than your Jesus.

Moving jumpers on an Asus? I think you must have the wrong Asus my friend. My Asus is configurable jumperless (out of the box default). All you need to do is diable audio, if it has it and you don't want it.

A7V133 rocks.

-* This Space For Rent *-
email for application details

Actually, I have the right one and I am not the only one who has had troubles with it booting into the bios giving hardware errors (mainly changing the voltage) in jumper free mode. However if you put it to jumper mode and don't give it a choice then it runs rock solid. Sorry to break it to you, but ASUS is not infallable, and while I love my board, OCing is a bit easier and more problem free on the other 2 boards. (abit and aopen)

My Jesus is whiter than your Jesus.

I'm not saying your board does it, but mine does. And it is a recovery thing, I wouldn't call it an option since I can't choose to disable it, but the board fails to post at the highest volatage setting and resets the voltage (I've left my clock at 100 always since I have a finiky nic), but if I set the jumpers, it never fails at post and always works fine.

My Jesus is whiter than your Jesus.

a7v133. Good to go.

so are you at 120FSB or 159 FSB?

I assume 120 - take that baby up to 133 straight off, lower your cpu multiplier if you need to. If you have a B type athlon then it is almost certainly good for whatever spped you are running at now, but it'll work faster and better at a lower % FSB overclock.

Up to 120FSB, the system still uses a 1/3 PCI/AGP bus divider. All your cards are trying to run 20% over spec, which is mostly pointless. Take your cpu up to about 140FSB and a lower multiplier, the cards are more in tolerance and you have a lot more memory bandwidth to play with. Your system will probably be more stabe and you might get higher.

Go on - give it some 'wellie'!

Pete.

-* This Space For Rent *-
email for application details

I'm sure as most people have noted that the A7V133 performs quite well and in fact wins most benchmarks although by slim margins. However, speaking from personal experience, I would never again purchase any product from Asus until they manage to introduce the concept of technical support into their operations. Just read my post a bit lower down the overclocking page- I tried an Asus first, but when I had problems that I couldn't solve, Asus was not there to support me. There is no technical support hotline, and the email tech support system is a joke-it even states right in the manual that most emails sent to them won't be replied to. That turned out to be true- I sent 3 different emails and never received responses from any of them. So I returned the Asus and purchased the Abit KT7A-Raid, which also performs quite well in most benchmarks. I experienced the same problem I was having with the Asus- it simply would not power up for more than a second. Frustrated, I tried Abit's tech support- To my surprise, they responded to me and suggested that my power supply might be at fault-which it was. I learned 2 things that day- that not all 300W ATX power supplies are the same, and that sometimes decent tech support can be MUCH more valuable than a few percentage points in a benchmark. Kudos to Abit for fine service and an outstanding product.

********************************
Wherever you go, there you are.

Both are good as brand names go. QC seems a little better on Asus (I've never had to RMA one) "Flexibility" is alittle higher on Abit's side. You aren't planning to upgrade from kt133 are you?