VIA In Shape: 6 Motherboards using the renewed KT133A Chipset

Asus A7V133

Board Revision : 1.01

BIOS Version : 1001C

The new A7V133 seems to be equipped very well, although there were hardly any changed since the initial A7V. It still comes with the ATA100 controller from Promise, which also allows you RAID level 0, although the 686B-southbridge supports ATA100 as well. Thus you can connect up to 8 ATA100 hard drives to this motherboard.

All CPU adjustments including multiplier, system speed (up to 166 MHz) and Vcore can either be done in the BIOS, or by using several dipswitches. The latter is basically interesting for system integrators who want to prevent users from changing important processor settings.

Asus ships an adapter for the two additional USB ports (a total of four). Just like the ABit KT7A, the VT8464 (the north bridge of the Apollo KT133A chipset) is cooled by a HSF. You can find an AMR slot on the motherboard, which shares it’s space with the fifth PCI slot. Thus you don’t have to give up a PCI slot just due to the presence of the usually useless AMR interface, but you still have to pay for it.

The A7V133 comes with an AGP Pro connector, which has some more pins to ensure a proper power supply of high-end graphics cards. Three DIMM sockets will hold up to 1.5 GB of SDRAM memory. I just missed any note about ECC, which lets me suppose that this memory type is not supported.

We have big expectations towards a top brand like Asus. This board’s performance was not high enough to declare the A7V133 the winner of this review. The results of the different motherboard candidates turned out to be too close together this time.