Top Page LOSTCIRCUITS At One Glance Configuration SiSoft Sandra
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LOSTCIRCUITS 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 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
Transcript of Top Page LOSTCIRCUITS At One Glance Configuration SiSoft Sandra
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Summary
The launch of VIAs 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 eg 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
magnification that is you can artificially blow up a few things but the raw performance does not really change too much
One possible and very clean way out of this dilemma would have been to increase the FSB from the current 133 MHz to the next level that is 166 MHz along with offering the option of running the memory at Host Clock or -PCI frequency as precedented by VIAs earlier P2PIII chipsets and get on with business as usual Needless to say that this development was part of the original Athlon roadmap showing FSB frequencies of up to 200 400 MHz clock data rate As so often however Thor the chief of the Norse Gods in Walhalla threw his Hammer to disrupt the activities of the earthlings Well just substitute Dresden for Walhalla Hammer still remains Hammer and the net effect is the same as long as you accept Athlons as Earthlings
Bottomline is that Hammer appears to come along faster than anticipated allowing AMD to skip some of their planned stepping stones on the roadmap from Athlon to Hammer The latest victim is Bartons new clothes in form of SOI other casualties are the higher FSB versions that is 166 or 200 MHz Basically the reason is nothing but the fact that going through the tedious process of validating every last bit of functionality is not worth the effort in view of an entirely new platform already knocking at the door
Heart of the new and improved VIA KT333A chipset is the KT333 NorthBridge (CD or higher reviwion)
On the other end of the seesaw VIA Technologies have been spinning their own agenda that is shooting for being the number one performance chipset supplier for the Socket A platform and they have done an extraordinarily good job Granted that there are some errata or insufficiencies in the IDE transfer as reported elsewhere but there are also some simple workarounds in the form of increasing the PCI latency as long as the BIOS interface supports this option or else using the patch provided by George Breese to change the PCI registers on the fly and accomplish the same net effect
Still the DRAM industry has been running off with performance of DDR ever since the introduction of the platform and why not use the existing FSB scheme with a higher memory bus as done earlier with the Apollo and KX chipset series In other words there is a new niche in the chipset market and there are new chipsets to fill it The first revisions aka KT333 (chip markings lower than CD) were immediately replaced with the 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
next page =gt At One Glance =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
At One Glance
ASUS A7V333VIA KT333 (KT333-VT8233) 5 PCI Promise RAID 01 CMedia 6 channel sound Onboard Firewire
CPU interface
Socket 462 for AMD Athlon (Thunderbird Palomino Duron) processors
Chipset
VIA KT333 DDR chipset VIA KT333 (CE) North Bridge VIA VT8233 South Bridge VLink 266 MBsec high speed interconnect
FSB Multiplier and Voltage Settings
1 MHz micro stepping in BIOS 100-230 MHz with automatic PCI divider adjustments from 13 to 15 as a function of FSB frequency Multiplier settings in BIOS (6-14 x) Vre 1675- 23V via jumpers Default +0025 +005 in BIOS V DDR 26V - 306V via jumpers
System Memory
3 184 pin DIMM slots supporting 64MB to 1GB DDR DIMMs for maximum 3GB system memory DRAM operating mode By SPD manual
Memory Adjustment Settings
CPU DRAM ratio (11 45) CAS latency 2 25 tRCD 2 3 tRP 2 3 tRAS 5T 6T Bank Interleave disabled 2 bank 4 bank DRAM Command Rate 2T 1T Burst Length 4 QW (quad words 1 QW= 4 bytes = 32 bits) auto DQS IO delay (in [Hex] values) Drive Strength (in [Hex] values)
Expansion Slots
1 AGP (4x) slot 5 32 bit PCI slots (manual assignment of IRQ Int 1-4)
Sound
CMedia CM8738 6-channel audio onboard
BIOS
Award Medallion BIOS PC-99 PnP ACPI APM DMI Green support
IO Interface
2 x EIDE channels (up to four devices) PIO mode 345 ATAPI UDMA 3366100 2 x IDE RAID 10 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 PS2 mouse ATX keyboard port 6 x USB ports (2 back panel 4 front panel USB headers) 1 x IrDA 1 x Line-out Line-in Mic-in 1 x Game MIDI port on separate back panel bracket 1 x SPDIF connector 1 x Line IO header 1 x AFPANEL (iPanel) 1 x AAPANEL (iPanel sound) 1 x SMBus 1 x Secure Digital memory interface 1 x memory Stick 1 x Smart Card Reader 1 x IEEE 1394 Firewire connector
Hardware Monitoring and Power Saving
V core V IO board voltage Fan rpm CPU and system temp Power Saving LED
Form Factor and Dimensions
ATX 304 x 245 mm
next page =gt What You Get =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 Along this tradition are the features of the A7V333 there are some old acquaintances as the custom tailored IO shield which is needed since the ATX IO connector block is non-standard Standard features also include the manual and install CD along with the little bag with extra jumpers and two 80 ribbon UATA cables and the mandatory floppy cable Here it is though where the standard features end In terms of documentation ASUS has added a Quick Reference Card that at one glance shows the A7V333 by numbers Unfortunately though there is no legend to explain the numbers a small but potentially painful and at least puzzling omission Another quick setup guide in a gazillion of languages makes sure that worldwide distribution of the board is not hindered by language barriers
The lack of the explanatory collateral for the Quick Reference Card is more than made up for by the included sticker with all mainboard settings and jumpers that is as long as they are documented at all The sticker further contains the settings for the 6 x dip switch that can be used to manually select the external CPU frequency (a better description than Front Side Bus which is a Pentium2 legacy) from 100 MHz all the way up to 230 MHz The sticker also features descriptions of all jumpers except for JP1 and JP2 we will have more on those later
The ATX IO connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 20 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface
In terms of additional hardware the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 20 bracket which further sports the game port missing in the IO panel Moreover ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world
The manual is typical ASUS quality well organized and to the point even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable Interestingly the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors
We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example Overclocking the processor is not recommended It may result in a slower speed
In the BIOS section the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F We wont hold this against ASUS though for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto
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 However there are also design differences that come into play in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels that is the main controller signaling to the driver chips which in turn drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech With three phases this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs However the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
magnification that is you can artificially blow up a few things but the raw performance does not really change too much
One possible and very clean way out of this dilemma would have been to increase the FSB from the current 133 MHz to the next level that is 166 MHz along with offering the option of running the memory at Host Clock or -PCI frequency as precedented by VIAs earlier P2PIII chipsets and get on with business as usual Needless to say that this development was part of the original Athlon roadmap showing FSB frequencies of up to 200 400 MHz clock data rate As so often however Thor the chief of the Norse Gods in Walhalla threw his Hammer to disrupt the activities of the earthlings Well just substitute Dresden for Walhalla Hammer still remains Hammer and the net effect is the same as long as you accept Athlons as Earthlings
Bottomline is that Hammer appears to come along faster than anticipated allowing AMD to skip some of their planned stepping stones on the roadmap from Athlon to Hammer The latest victim is Bartons new clothes in form of SOI other casualties are the higher FSB versions that is 166 or 200 MHz Basically the reason is nothing but the fact that going through the tedious process of validating every last bit of functionality is not worth the effort in view of an entirely new platform already knocking at the door
Heart of the new and improved VIA KT333A chipset is the KT333 NorthBridge (CD or higher reviwion)
On the other end of the seesaw VIA Technologies have been spinning their own agenda that is shooting for being the number one performance chipset supplier for the Socket A platform and they have done an extraordinarily good job Granted that there are some errata or insufficiencies in the IDE transfer as reported elsewhere but there are also some simple workarounds in the form of increasing the PCI latency as long as the BIOS interface supports this option or else using the patch provided by George Breese to change the PCI registers on the fly and accomplish the same net effect
Still the DRAM industry has been running off with performance of DDR ever since the introduction of the platform and why not use the existing FSB scheme with a higher memory bus as done earlier with the Apollo and KX chipset series In other words there is a new niche in the chipset market and there are new chipsets to fill it The first revisions aka KT333 (chip markings lower than CD) were immediately replaced with the 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
next page =gt At One Glance =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
At One Glance
ASUS A7V333VIA KT333 (KT333-VT8233) 5 PCI Promise RAID 01 CMedia 6 channel sound Onboard Firewire
CPU interface
Socket 462 for AMD Athlon (Thunderbird Palomino Duron) processors
Chipset
VIA KT333 DDR chipset VIA KT333 (CE) North Bridge VIA VT8233 South Bridge VLink 266 MBsec high speed interconnect
FSB Multiplier and Voltage Settings
1 MHz micro stepping in BIOS 100-230 MHz with automatic PCI divider adjustments from 13 to 15 as a function of FSB frequency Multiplier settings in BIOS (6-14 x) Vre 1675- 23V via jumpers Default +0025 +005 in BIOS V DDR 26V - 306V via jumpers
System Memory
3 184 pin DIMM slots supporting 64MB to 1GB DDR DIMMs for maximum 3GB system memory DRAM operating mode By SPD manual
Memory Adjustment Settings
CPU DRAM ratio (11 45) CAS latency 2 25 tRCD 2 3 tRP 2 3 tRAS 5T 6T Bank Interleave disabled 2 bank 4 bank DRAM Command Rate 2T 1T Burst Length 4 QW (quad words 1 QW= 4 bytes = 32 bits) auto DQS IO delay (in [Hex] values) Drive Strength (in [Hex] values)
Expansion Slots
1 AGP (4x) slot 5 32 bit PCI slots (manual assignment of IRQ Int 1-4)
Sound
CMedia CM8738 6-channel audio onboard
BIOS
Award Medallion BIOS PC-99 PnP ACPI APM DMI Green support
IO Interface
2 x EIDE channels (up to four devices) PIO mode 345 ATAPI UDMA 3366100 2 x IDE RAID 10 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 PS2 mouse ATX keyboard port 6 x USB ports (2 back panel 4 front panel USB headers) 1 x IrDA 1 x Line-out Line-in Mic-in 1 x Game MIDI port on separate back panel bracket 1 x SPDIF connector 1 x Line IO header 1 x AFPANEL (iPanel) 1 x AAPANEL (iPanel sound) 1 x SMBus 1 x Secure Digital memory interface 1 x memory Stick 1 x Smart Card Reader 1 x IEEE 1394 Firewire connector
Hardware Monitoring and Power Saving
V core V IO board voltage Fan rpm CPU and system temp Power Saving LED
Form Factor and Dimensions
ATX 304 x 245 mm
next page =gt What You Get =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 Along this tradition are the features of the A7V333 there are some old acquaintances as the custom tailored IO shield which is needed since the ATX IO connector block is non-standard Standard features also include the manual and install CD along with the little bag with extra jumpers and two 80 ribbon UATA cables and the mandatory floppy cable Here it is though where the standard features end In terms of documentation ASUS has added a Quick Reference Card that at one glance shows the A7V333 by numbers Unfortunately though there is no legend to explain the numbers a small but potentially painful and at least puzzling omission Another quick setup guide in a gazillion of languages makes sure that worldwide distribution of the board is not hindered by language barriers
The lack of the explanatory collateral for the Quick Reference Card is more than made up for by the included sticker with all mainboard settings and jumpers that is as long as they are documented at all The sticker further contains the settings for the 6 x dip switch that can be used to manually select the external CPU frequency (a better description than Front Side Bus which is a Pentium2 legacy) from 100 MHz all the way up to 230 MHz The sticker also features descriptions of all jumpers except for JP1 and JP2 we will have more on those later
The ATX IO connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 20 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface
In terms of additional hardware the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 20 bracket which further sports the game port missing in the IO panel Moreover ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world
The manual is typical ASUS quality well organized and to the point even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable Interestingly the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors
We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example Overclocking the processor is not recommended It may result in a slower speed
In the BIOS section the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F We wont hold this against ASUS though for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto
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 However there are also design differences that come into play in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels that is the main controller signaling to the driver chips which in turn drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech With three phases this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs However the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop Page
At One Glance Features
Layout Ln-board Peripherals
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Content Creation WS2001 Expendable
Quake3 Arena 3DMark Overclocking
Conclusion
Hot Offers for the A7V333
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
At One Glance
ASUS A7V333VIA KT333 (KT333-VT8233) 5 PCI Promise RAID 01 CMedia 6 channel sound Onboard Firewire
CPU interface
Socket 462 for AMD Athlon (Thunderbird Palomino Duron) processors
Chipset
VIA KT333 DDR chipset VIA KT333 (CE) North Bridge VIA VT8233 South Bridge VLink 266 MBsec high speed interconnect
FSB Multiplier and Voltage Settings
1 MHz micro stepping in BIOS 100-230 MHz with automatic PCI divider adjustments from 13 to 15 as a function of FSB frequency Multiplier settings in BIOS (6-14 x) Vre 1675- 23V via jumpers Default +0025 +005 in BIOS V DDR 26V - 306V via jumpers
System Memory
3 184 pin DIMM slots supporting 64MB to 1GB DDR DIMMs for maximum 3GB system memory DRAM operating mode By SPD manual
Memory Adjustment Settings
CPU DRAM ratio (11 45) CAS latency 2 25 tRCD 2 3 tRP 2 3 tRAS 5T 6T Bank Interleave disabled 2 bank 4 bank DRAM Command Rate 2T 1T Burst Length 4 QW (quad words 1 QW= 4 bytes = 32 bits) auto DQS IO delay (in [Hex] values) Drive Strength (in [Hex] values)
Expansion Slots
1 AGP (4x) slot 5 32 bit PCI slots (manual assignment of IRQ Int 1-4)
Sound
CMedia CM8738 6-channel audio onboard
BIOS
Award Medallion BIOS PC-99 PnP ACPI APM DMI Green support
IO Interface
2 x EIDE channels (up to four devices) PIO mode 345 ATAPI UDMA 3366100 2 x IDE RAID 10 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 PS2 mouse ATX keyboard port 6 x USB ports (2 back panel 4 front panel USB headers) 1 x IrDA 1 x Line-out Line-in Mic-in 1 x Game MIDI port on separate back panel bracket 1 x SPDIF connector 1 x Line IO header 1 x AFPANEL (iPanel) 1 x AAPANEL (iPanel sound) 1 x SMBus 1 x Secure Digital memory interface 1 x memory Stick 1 x Smart Card Reader 1 x IEEE 1394 Firewire connector
Hardware Monitoring and Power Saving
V core V IO board voltage Fan rpm CPU and system temp Power Saving LED
Form Factor and Dimensions
ATX 304 x 245 mm
next page =gt What You Get =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 Along this tradition are the features of the A7V333 there are some old acquaintances as the custom tailored IO shield which is needed since the ATX IO connector block is non-standard Standard features also include the manual and install CD along with the little bag with extra jumpers and two 80 ribbon UATA cables and the mandatory floppy cable Here it is though where the standard features end In terms of documentation ASUS has added a Quick Reference Card that at one glance shows the A7V333 by numbers Unfortunately though there is no legend to explain the numbers a small but potentially painful and at least puzzling omission Another quick setup guide in a gazillion of languages makes sure that worldwide distribution of the board is not hindered by language barriers
The lack of the explanatory collateral for the Quick Reference Card is more than made up for by the included sticker with all mainboard settings and jumpers that is as long as they are documented at all The sticker further contains the settings for the 6 x dip switch that can be used to manually select the external CPU frequency (a better description than Front Side Bus which is a Pentium2 legacy) from 100 MHz all the way up to 230 MHz The sticker also features descriptions of all jumpers except for JP1 and JP2 we will have more on those later
The ATX IO connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 20 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface
In terms of additional hardware the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 20 bracket which further sports the game port missing in the IO panel Moreover ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world
The manual is typical ASUS quality well organized and to the point even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable Interestingly the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors
We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example Overclocking the processor is not recommended It may result in a slower speed
In the BIOS section the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F We wont hold this against ASUS though for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto
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 However there are also design differences that come into play in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels that is the main controller signaling to the driver chips which in turn drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech With three phases this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs However the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
ASUS A7V333VIA KT333 (KT333-VT8233) 5 PCI Promise RAID 01 CMedia 6 channel sound Onboard Firewire
CPU interface
Socket 462 for AMD Athlon (Thunderbird Palomino Duron) processors
Chipset
VIA KT333 DDR chipset VIA KT333 (CE) North Bridge VIA VT8233 South Bridge VLink 266 MBsec high speed interconnect
FSB Multiplier and Voltage Settings
1 MHz micro stepping in BIOS 100-230 MHz with automatic PCI divider adjustments from 13 to 15 as a function of FSB frequency Multiplier settings in BIOS (6-14 x) Vre 1675- 23V via jumpers Default +0025 +005 in BIOS V DDR 26V - 306V via jumpers
System Memory
3 184 pin DIMM slots supporting 64MB to 1GB DDR DIMMs for maximum 3GB system memory DRAM operating mode By SPD manual
Memory Adjustment Settings
CPU DRAM ratio (11 45) CAS latency 2 25 tRCD 2 3 tRP 2 3 tRAS 5T 6T Bank Interleave disabled 2 bank 4 bank DRAM Command Rate 2T 1T Burst Length 4 QW (quad words 1 QW= 4 bytes = 32 bits) auto DQS IO delay (in [Hex] values) Drive Strength (in [Hex] values)
Expansion Slots
1 AGP (4x) slot 5 32 bit PCI slots (manual assignment of IRQ Int 1-4)
Sound
CMedia CM8738 6-channel audio onboard
BIOS
Award Medallion BIOS PC-99 PnP ACPI APM DMI Green support
IO Interface
2 x EIDE channels (up to four devices) PIO mode 345 ATAPI UDMA 3366100 2 x IDE RAID 10 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 PS2 mouse ATX keyboard port 6 x USB ports (2 back panel 4 front panel USB headers) 1 x IrDA 1 x Line-out Line-in Mic-in 1 x Game MIDI port on separate back panel bracket 1 x SPDIF connector 1 x Line IO header 1 x AFPANEL (iPanel) 1 x AAPANEL (iPanel sound) 1 x SMBus 1 x Secure Digital memory interface 1 x memory Stick 1 x Smart Card Reader 1 x IEEE 1394 Firewire connector
Hardware Monitoring and Power Saving
V core V IO board voltage Fan rpm CPU and system temp Power Saving LED
Form Factor and Dimensions
ATX 304 x 245 mm
next page =gt What You Get =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 Along this tradition are the features of the A7V333 there are some old acquaintances as the custom tailored IO shield which is needed since the ATX IO connector block is non-standard Standard features also include the manual and install CD along with the little bag with extra jumpers and two 80 ribbon UATA cables and the mandatory floppy cable Here it is though where the standard features end In terms of documentation ASUS has added a Quick Reference Card that at one glance shows the A7V333 by numbers Unfortunately though there is no legend to explain the numbers a small but potentially painful and at least puzzling omission Another quick setup guide in a gazillion of languages makes sure that worldwide distribution of the board is not hindered by language barriers
The lack of the explanatory collateral for the Quick Reference Card is more than made up for by the included sticker with all mainboard settings and jumpers that is as long as they are documented at all The sticker further contains the settings for the 6 x dip switch that can be used to manually select the external CPU frequency (a better description than Front Side Bus which is a Pentium2 legacy) from 100 MHz all the way up to 230 MHz The sticker also features descriptions of all jumpers except for JP1 and JP2 we will have more on those later
The ATX IO connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 20 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface
In terms of additional hardware the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 20 bracket which further sports the game port missing in the IO panel Moreover ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world
The manual is typical ASUS quality well organized and to the point even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable Interestingly the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors
We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example Overclocking the processor is not recommended It may result in a slower speed
In the BIOS section the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F We wont hold this against ASUS though for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto
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 However there are also design differences that come into play in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels that is the main controller signaling to the driver chips which in turn drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech With three phases this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs However the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
VIA KT333 DDR chipset VIA KT333 (CE) North Bridge VIA VT8233 South Bridge VLink 266 MBsec high speed interconnect
FSB Multiplier and Voltage Settings
1 MHz micro stepping in BIOS 100-230 MHz with automatic PCI divider adjustments from 13 to 15 as a function of FSB frequency Multiplier settings in BIOS (6-14 x) Vre 1675- 23V via jumpers Default +0025 +005 in BIOS V DDR 26V - 306V via jumpers
System Memory
3 184 pin DIMM slots supporting 64MB to 1GB DDR DIMMs for maximum 3GB system memory DRAM operating mode By SPD manual
Memory Adjustment Settings
CPU DRAM ratio (11 45) CAS latency 2 25 tRCD 2 3 tRP 2 3 tRAS 5T 6T Bank Interleave disabled 2 bank 4 bank DRAM Command Rate 2T 1T Burst Length 4 QW (quad words 1 QW= 4 bytes = 32 bits) auto DQS IO delay (in [Hex] values) Drive Strength (in [Hex] values)
Expansion Slots
1 AGP (4x) slot 5 32 bit PCI slots (manual assignment of IRQ Int 1-4)
Sound
CMedia CM8738 6-channel audio onboard
BIOS
Award Medallion BIOS PC-99 PnP ACPI APM DMI Green support
IO Interface
2 x EIDE channels (up to four devices) PIO mode 345 ATAPI UDMA 3366100 2 x IDE RAID 10 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 PS2 mouse ATX keyboard port 6 x USB ports (2 back panel 4 front panel USB headers) 1 x IrDA 1 x Line-out Line-in Mic-in 1 x Game MIDI port on separate back panel bracket 1 x SPDIF connector 1 x Line IO header 1 x AFPANEL (iPanel) 1 x AAPANEL (iPanel sound) 1 x SMBus 1 x Secure Digital memory interface 1 x memory Stick 1 x Smart Card Reader 1 x IEEE 1394 Firewire connector
Hardware Monitoring and Power Saving
V core V IO board voltage Fan rpm CPU and system temp Power Saving LED
Form Factor and Dimensions
ATX 304 x 245 mm
next page =gt What You Get =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 Along this tradition are the features of the A7V333 there are some old acquaintances as the custom tailored IO shield which is needed since the ATX IO connector block is non-standard Standard features also include the manual and install CD along with the little bag with extra jumpers and two 80 ribbon UATA cables and the mandatory floppy cable Here it is though where the standard features end In terms of documentation ASUS has added a Quick Reference Card that at one glance shows the A7V333 by numbers Unfortunately though there is no legend to explain the numbers a small but potentially painful and at least puzzling omission Another quick setup guide in a gazillion of languages makes sure that worldwide distribution of the board is not hindered by language barriers
The lack of the explanatory collateral for the Quick Reference Card is more than made up for by the included sticker with all mainboard settings and jumpers that is as long as they are documented at all The sticker further contains the settings for the 6 x dip switch that can be used to manually select the external CPU frequency (a better description than Front Side Bus which is a Pentium2 legacy) from 100 MHz all the way up to 230 MHz The sticker also features descriptions of all jumpers except for JP1 and JP2 we will have more on those later
The ATX IO connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 20 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface
In terms of additional hardware the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 20 bracket which further sports the game port missing in the IO panel Moreover ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world
The manual is typical ASUS quality well organized and to the point even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable Interestingly the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors
We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example Overclocking the processor is not recommended It may result in a slower speed
In the BIOS section the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F We wont hold this against ASUS though for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto
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 However there are also design differences that come into play in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels that is the main controller signaling to the driver chips which in turn drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech With three phases this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs However the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
BIOS
Award Medallion BIOS PC-99 PnP ACPI APM DMI Green support
IO Interface
2 x EIDE channels (up to four devices) PIO mode 345 ATAPI UDMA 3366100 2 x IDE RAID 10 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 PS2 mouse ATX keyboard port 6 x USB ports (2 back panel 4 front panel USB headers) 1 x IrDA 1 x Line-out Line-in Mic-in 1 x Game MIDI port on separate back panel bracket 1 x SPDIF connector 1 x Line IO header 1 x AFPANEL (iPanel) 1 x AAPANEL (iPanel sound) 1 x SMBus 1 x Secure Digital memory interface 1 x memory Stick 1 x Smart Card Reader 1 x IEEE 1394 Firewire connector
Hardware Monitoring and Power Saving
V core V IO board voltage Fan rpm CPU and system temp Power Saving LED
Form Factor and Dimensions
ATX 304 x 245 mm
next page =gt What You Get =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 Along this tradition are the features of the A7V333 there are some old acquaintances as the custom tailored IO shield which is needed since the ATX IO connector block is non-standard Standard features also include the manual and install CD along with the little bag with extra jumpers and two 80 ribbon UATA cables and the mandatory floppy cable Here it is though where the standard features end In terms of documentation ASUS has added a Quick Reference Card that at one glance shows the A7V333 by numbers Unfortunately though there is no legend to explain the numbers a small but potentially painful and at least puzzling omission Another quick setup guide in a gazillion of languages makes sure that worldwide distribution of the board is not hindered by language barriers
The lack of the explanatory collateral for the Quick Reference Card is more than made up for by the included sticker with all mainboard settings and jumpers that is as long as they are documented at all The sticker further contains the settings for the 6 x dip switch that can be used to manually select the external CPU frequency (a better description than Front Side Bus which is a Pentium2 legacy) from 100 MHz all the way up to 230 MHz The sticker also features descriptions of all jumpers except for JP1 and JP2 we will have more on those later
The ATX IO connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 20 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface
In terms of additional hardware the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 20 bracket which further sports the game port missing in the IO panel Moreover ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world
The manual is typical ASUS quality well organized and to the point even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable Interestingly the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors
We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example Overclocking the processor is not recommended It may result in a slower speed
In the BIOS section the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F We wont hold this against ASUS though for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto
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 However there are also design differences that come into play in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels that is the main controller signaling to the driver chips which in turn drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech With three phases this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs However the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 Along this tradition are the features of the A7V333 there are some old acquaintances as the custom tailored IO shield which is needed since the ATX IO connector block is non-standard Standard features also include the manual and install CD along with the little bag with extra jumpers and two 80 ribbon UATA cables and the mandatory floppy cable Here it is though where the standard features end In terms of documentation ASUS has added a Quick Reference Card that at one glance shows the A7V333 by numbers Unfortunately though there is no legend to explain the numbers a small but potentially painful and at least puzzling omission Another quick setup guide in a gazillion of languages makes sure that worldwide distribution of the board is not hindered by language barriers
The lack of the explanatory collateral for the Quick Reference Card is more than made up for by the included sticker with all mainboard settings and jumpers that is as long as they are documented at all The sticker further contains the settings for the 6 x dip switch that can be used to manually select the external CPU frequency (a better description than Front Side Bus which is a Pentium2 legacy) from 100 MHz all the way up to 230 MHz The sticker also features descriptions of all jumpers except for JP1 and JP2 we will have more on those later
The ATX IO connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 20 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface
In terms of additional hardware the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 20 bracket which further sports the game port missing in the IO panel Moreover ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world
The manual is typical ASUS quality well organized and to the point even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable Interestingly the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors
We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example Overclocking the processor is not recommended It may result in a slower speed
In the BIOS section the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F We wont hold this against ASUS though for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto
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 However there are also design differences that come into play in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels that is the main controller signaling to the driver chips which in turn drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech With three phases this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs However the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
The ATX IO connector block is non-standard and leaves out the Game Port in favor of an additional USB 20 dual port which is certainly more useful than the legacy interface
In terms of additional hardware the A7V333 ships with an extra dual port USB 20 bracket which further sports the game port missing in the IO panel Moreover ASUS includes an IEEE 1394 connector bracket certainly a much appreciated novelty in the mainboard world
The manual is typical ASUS quality well organized and to the point even though the checklist did not (for the first time with ASUS) match the shipping contents in that the firewire module is not listed at all and the second 80 wire ribbon cable was listed as 40 ribbon cable Interestingly the IEEE 1394 module is not mentioned with a single word in the manual at all One sheet (2 pages) with last minute additions errata addresses the lack of STR support in Jumper Enable mode and a few other small errors
We still found some interesting statements in the manual as for example Overclocking the processor is not recommended It may result in a slower speed
In the BIOS section the manual falls short with some of the new settings for DDR control which are all thrown into the same pot labeled Useful Test Parameters and show the options in Hex code values from 0 to F We wont hold this against ASUS though for the user it is best to leave those settings at Auto
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 However there are also design differences that come into play in that most standard power regulation circuits are organized into three separate levels that is the main controller signaling to the driver chips which in turn drive the switch voltage regulators or MOSFETs So much for the standard layout used by Intersil and SemTech With three phases this is a great concept and suffices for most CPUs However the intrinsic limitations of the design is the above described separation into three operational and physical
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
levels The connectivity between the individual levels has to abide by the laws of electronics meaning that operating frequency and trace resistance result in rather high impedances which are putting a ceiling on the real world switching capabilities even if all components used are capable of running much faster
A possible workaround is to integrate the control circuitry and the driver chips into the same IC a design recently pioneered by OnSemiconductors The lack of traces allows much faster regulation by means of mechanisms like early cycle termination so that effectively the integrated 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
next page =gt Overall Layout Integrated Peripherals =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 What has not changed is the general arrangement of components and standard connectors In short we still find the CPU socket in N-W orientation and extremely close to the three DIMM slots We still see the two standard IDE ports below the two RAID channels enabled by a Promise controller and the floppy drive connector horizontally oriented at the bottom of the PCB Also we still have five PCI and one AGP Pro slot Unchanged are the position of the ATX power connector and the standby power LED as well
That is pretty much where the similarities end though The promise PDC 20256 controller has been replaced by the PDC 20276 chip with extended UATA133 capabilities the ACR seen on the A7V266-E has disappeared completely and instead we have a whole variety of new interfaces Bottom line is that we are looking at an entirely new PCB which has carried over a few of the design rules of the earlier version but shows otherwise a completely new face especially in the lower half
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
VIA USB 20 Controller
Thus far USB 20 has been the domain of NEC with their different variations of USB20 controller chips in QFP or BGA format This will certainly change in the near future since VIAs 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 20 interface but itll move into the mainboard field very fast
CMedia Onboard Sound
The 6-channel CMI8378 chip has almost become a commodity with high-end mainboards and the only serious competition is the on-board Sound-Blaster as seen on some GigaByte boards The sound quality is more than acceptable and makes any additional sound card rather superfluous which is just another reason for the above-mentioned lack of the ACR slot there is simply no need for another software-based audio interface
The included backpanel bracket features two IEEE 1394 Firewire ports The wide connector on the cable plugs into the mainboard IEEE 1394 connector
IEEE 1394 OnBoard Firewire
A novel integrated peripheral is the on-board IEEE 1394a Firewire using the TexasInstruments TSB43AB21 chip This IEEE 1394a integrated link controller and physical layer (PHY) device features an integrated 400-megabit per second (Mbps) 1-port compatible with version 11 of the Open Host Control Interface (OHCI) specification Intelligent integrated power management and a 18-V core operating voltage with universal PCI interfaces compatible with 33-V and 5-V PCI signaling environments make the TI controller the probably most suitable IC for integrated Firewire Keep in mind that this particular chip only features a single port This also means that one needs to make a decision which of the two interfaces offered on the bracket will be used since the cable can only be connected to one of the two interfaces at the time
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Jumpers and Switches
In times where everybody follows the jumperless trend it is a bit nostalgic to see a board featuring not one or two but a whole battery of jumpers Suffice it to say that under many conditions jumpers and switches are much preferable over any software (including BIOS)- based solution The minor inconvenience caused by a one time enabling disabling of certain integrated peripherals is no comparison to the nuisance of a PnP OS constantly searching for additional hardware that was disabled in the BIOS but still spooks around in the background In other words the true art is to find a compromise between features that make sense to support in SoftBIOS mode and those that are better off by the unambiguous ways of hard setting
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 Memory Stick media interfaces and the infamous POST Reporter which comments on the different boot processes (the last thing I
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
personally would need but then some like it) All in all ASUS deserves a high commendation for this solution since it is independent of the BIOS revision and plain and simply cleaner than any soft solution Needless to say that these jumpers dont really need any further description the same holds for the audio bass center setting
A small Hors dOeuvre 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 4 and 5 are audio and Firewire enable The Firewire connector is partially visible next to the VDDR jumpers Also in the picture are the dip switch to manually set FSB frequency the USB 20 header
enabled by the VIA VT6202 controller chip On the left of the USB chip is the TI IEEE 1394 controller on the right is the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel sound
There are a few other jumpers on board that deserve more attention First there is the known JEN jumper to enable disable jumper-free mode By default jumper-free is enabled however in order to eg access the dip switch the jumper needs to be moved
The VID1-4 header allows hard setting of the CPU core voltage from 1675 to 185V with two voltage outputs depending on which CPU type is used In order to really burn up the CPU though it is necessary to move the Voltage Regulator Output Limit jumper to the Unlimited position In addition the A7V333 features an undocumented Overvoltage jumper The same jumper on the P4B266 opens up additional Vre settings in the soft BIOS in the A7V333 moving the Overvoltage jumper simply increases the Vre by 03V that is if the Voltage Regulator Output Limit is set to unlimited Consequently if the Vre is set to 175 the real Vre as shown by the Hardware Monitor is 205V Better be careful with this one
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
It gets more confusing with the ROMSIP jumper The manual states This jumper selects the source for data to set functional parameters fir the CPU The default setting [1-2] enables present ROM data access from the chip Resetting the jumper to [2-3] enables the use of BIOS to set CPU parameters Phil Marlowe once said to me Dead men dont wear plaid That was 20 years ago and I still have no clue what it means We may have some more info on this matter shortly so stay tuned
DDR Voltages
When it comes to running voltages out of spec hardly any manufacturer has the kind of track record as ASUS From the P5A to the A7M266 the road has literally been paved with burned DIMMs and the A7V333 threatens to continue this tradition
The layout of the VDDR jumpers has been carried over from the A7V266-E that is jumpers JP1 and JP2 only the values have changed By default the A7V333 supplies a whopping 278-285 VDD and VDDQ (DDR core and IO voltage) The variation accounts for the differences in measurement on several boards Changing the jumper configuration allows settings between 259 and 306V The detailed settings are
ii 259 - 263V (same with one or both jumpers removed completely)i 278 - 285V (default setting out of spec according to JEDEC guidelines)i 288 - 296V 295 - 306V
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 Keep in mind that the settings are not documented and the high settings are not meant for public consumption by ASUS either
The interesting thing about these settings is that all current high-end DDR chips are using internal voltage regulators to reduce the core voltage to 18V which is necessary to run at high frequency The only parts of the chips that actually see the increased voltage are input output buffers and granted that those will wiggle a bit faster at higher voltages the net effect is counteracted by the fact that the internal voltage regulators produce a lot of heat that will overall slow down the chips In other words a sensitive approach would be to leave VDD alone but increase VDDQ Admittlely there are some older DIMMs that will run at 25V internally but those will hardly be used in PC2700 mode of operation which is the only scenario where the massive overvoltage would be of benefit
The recommendation in this case is similar as what we suggested for the A7M266 simply take off both JP1 and JP2 to bring the voltages back to where they belong Side effects are that the failure rate that is stuck bits and system crashes in memory-intensive applications go down quite dramatically In addition we saw up to 3 system performance increase in Expendable at the lower voltage It is not completely clear what causes this performance increase but any electronics will run faster and cleaner when they run cooler
next page =gt Dip Switch Connectors =gt
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Dip Switch
Above we already mentioned the JEN jumper and its function to enable disable jumperless mode One of the gizmos depending on the JEN-jumper is the dip switch that can be used to manually assign the following frequencies to the external CPU bus [in MHz]
100 133 140 150 166 170 180 190 200 220 230
Unfortunately there is no documentation about what happens to the PCI bus at the higher frequency settings however the soft BIOS shows switching from the 13 to the frac14 divider at 120 MHz and further to the 15 divider at 160 MHz
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
Connectors
The number of jumpers on the A7V333 is only exceeded by the number of on-board connectors We have the standard audio IO connectors backed by two line-out line-in headers both jumpered by default to route the audio signals to the IO backpanel A Digital audio interface is provided in form of the SPDIF header
A back panel bracket featuring the gameport and two USB 20 11 ports acts as substitute for the missing gameport in the ATX IO panel
Other connectors include infrared (SIR + CIR) SMBus chassis intrusion and thermal sensor The missing game port can be installed via the game port connector at the bottom of the PCB next to the Smart Card Reader header For those who still need additional USB ports the A7V333 features an extra USB11 header which is pin-compatible with the USB 20 standard so that the bracket included with the shipping content can be hooked up to either header
Specialty connectors are the interface for the IEEE 1394a Firewire port and the SD MS (secure digital and memory stick) smart media headers that can connect to the appropriate reader Somewhat surprising is that only 3 fan connectors are found on the board
In addition the A7V333 features the proprietary ASUS iPanel Interface as well as the AFPanel (Audio Front Panel)
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
BIOS
As in all current ASUS mainboards the A7V333 features the Award Medallion BIOS interface For most parts the BIOS is rather standard multiplier settings are offered up to 14x which of course will only work with an unlocked CPU What we found with the XP2100+ though was that selection of lower multiplier values was simply ignored whereas setting of 135 and 14x would result in POST failure
With the original 1005 BIOS we experienced all sorts of stability problems however the latest (1006) BIOS solved all those problems One new setting in the Advanced menu is the System Performance that can be set to Optimal and Turbo with Turbo being somewhat faster but also less stable
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 To make a long story short the values are given in [Hex] format and personally I would not recommend messing around with them since there is no telling what changing the settings will really do to the system Quite honestly there is also no reason at all to make these settings user-accessible unless one is fishing for eye candy
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
to disabled
All other settings are standard the BIOS offers soft setting of Vre (in four increments of 0025 each over the default value) External CPU speed adjustments from 100 to 230 MHz in 1 MHz steps (PCI divider switching at 120 and 160 MHz to frac14 and 15 respectively) and the usual memory timing adjustments as there are CAS latency RAS-to-CAS Delay Precharge and RAS Active Time More settings comprise the chip select command rate disguised here as 1T CMD Rate with the options of enabled disabled
Compared to the original KT266 (A) chipset the new addition is the option of running the memory in asynchronous mode that is maintaining a 133 MHz FSB while the memory bus is running at 166 MHz Needless to say that in most cases this will require higher latencies and on a hardware level the involvement of fifos (first-in-first-out) pipelines and synchronizers that will take their toll on the overall performance The respective setting in the BIOS is the CPUMemory frequency ratio that can be set to either 11 or 45
The Hardware Monitor shows CPU and Mainboard temperatures as well as fan rotational speeds and Vre 12V 5V and 33V
Test Configuration
Hardware
ASUS A7V333 AMD Athlon XP2100+ 1 x 512 MB Mushkin PC2100 Level 2 DDR ATi Radeon 8500 IBM 60GXP (205GB) ASUS 40x CDROM Intel 10-100T Fast Ethernet adapter Alps Electric Floppy Drive
Software
Windows2000 Professional W2K Service Pack2 ATi W2K 6058 drivers (beta)
Installation and Setup
Physical setup is no problem at all courtesy of the excellent Driver CD As touched upon briefly already the original 1005 BIOS had caused some stability issues that were completely resolved with flashing to the 1006 version The only issue that popped up in this case was an error message at the end of the POST stating Error Cant write ESCD Error Cant write ESCD This issue was resolved by enabling Reset Configuration Data in the BIOS once after which the value defaulted back automatically
to disabled
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
conditions that are limited mostly by the page size and Page Hit limitations (if those are imposed by the controller) With an optimized path current high-end systems are capable of achieving up to roughly 95 bus utilization That is with a PC2100 interface bandwidth rates of 2050 are not uncommon The big question is how the asynchronous memory bus behaves under these conditions especially since as mentioned above the CPU bus cannot handle more than 2100 MBsec in the first place
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Memory Subsystem SiSoft Sandra 2002
As already mentioned running the memory bus at 166MHz or at 54 harmonics of the external CPU bus requires some mechanisms to translate the higher memory speed to the same data rate at which the EV6 bus is running These mechanisms include serially connected buffers that accept the data on one end and spit them out at the other side Suffice it to say that each buffer stage requires an extra clock cycle until the data are forwarded in other words the extra latencies eat up a substantial amount of bandwidth Exacerbating is that since the CPU bus runs at 266 Mbsp (Megabit sec and pin) and 64 bit width there is an a priori limitation to 2100 MBs between CPU and chipset that cannot be exceeded
Buffering Enabled
Buffering Enabled essentially means that prefetching is allowed and the memory bus is operating under optimized streaming
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
Turbo setting increases the PC2100 performance beyond the highest scores we got out of PC2700 operation Increasing the bus frequency shows pretty much the same picture
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 222 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS except for those at 45 (CPU Memory Frequency) and SPD where the latencies were increased to 2533 1T CMD Rate and 6T tRAS At the Optimal setting and 133 MHz memory bus the bandwidth is slightly lower than at the 166 and SPD setting Lowering the latencies at the 166 MHz setting does not buy very much consistent with the idea that the bottleneck is in the chipset rather than in the actual memory Moving to the
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
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 Therefore it is not too surprising that bandwidth gets the better of latencies meaning that the higher memory frequency shows slightly better results
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
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
next page =gt Performance Content Creation 3D Gaming =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Performance
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 heavily relies on memory but also on IO transfer which poses another bottleneck in this benchmark and can effectively clip the benefits of better memory bandwidth or higher CPU performance Keep that in mind when looking at the almost nonexistent performance difference between the DDR266 and DDR333
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
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
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
Expendable shows dependency on both memory frequency and latencies as we expected it These scores are nothing short of outstanding
next page =gt Quake3 Arena 3DMark2001SE =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
Quake3 Arena
The grandmother of all first person shooter games is still an excellent benckmark for overall system performance even though or actually because it is optimized for prefetching On the other hand despite heavily relying on bandwidth Quake3 Arena performance is also strongly influenced by latencies particularly chipset latencies We used Point Release 130 to upgrade the retail version and these recomplied DLLs for performance optimization The benchmark used was Demo_four
Fastest
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
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
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
Running at the Normal setting does not change the pecking order of the results
3DMark2001Se
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
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
next page =gt Overclocking Conclusion =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
LOSTCIRCUITS
SHORTCUTSTop 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
ASUS A7V333 Hit me with the voltage regulators
(Review by MS April 24 2002)
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 We had no problems at all to run up to 180 MHz while maintaining manual memory settings of 222 6T and 1T CMD rate Interestingly relaxing the timing settings did not improve the overclocking capabilities of the system thus it appears as if we were really running into a chipset issue this time
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
Saving the best for last this is the first time we see an AMD system beat the memory bandwidth performance of a Dual Channel Rambus system (even if it is only in Integer bandwidth) The score was obtained at 180 MHz 11 ratio 222 6T 1T Enabled using an
unlocked MP 1200 Processor buffering enabled to avoid any misunderstanding
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 One might go as far as to dispel the KT333 chipset as a marketing hype but there are always different ways of looking at it and one way probably the
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
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 cant 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 11 ratio and the lowest latencies Our benchmark results show that there is hardly any reason to push the 54 memory to CPU ratio unless really high quality memory is used that allows to run at 222 timing settings Most quality DDR DIMMs out there are capable of running 222 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 54 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 wouldnt 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
next page =gt More =gt
General disclaimer This page only reflects the authors 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 All names and trademarks mentioned in this review are the exclusive property of the respective parent companies All contents of this site are protected by international copyright laws Reproduction of the contents even in parts is not allowed except after written permission by the author and referral to this siteCopyright 2002 LostCircuits
![DesignCon 2014 - SiSoft...1 DesignCon 2014 How Design of Experiments Saved my CEI VSR 28G Design Richard Allred, SiSoft [rallred@sisoft.com] Barry Katz, SiSoft Ishwar Hosagrahar, Inphi](https://static.fdocuments.us/doc/165x107/5f19284848bb9016ff191954/designcon-2014-sisoft-1-designcon-2014-how-design-of-experiments-saved-my.jpg)
