Asus A7V

Thunderbird and Duron processors. Thunderbird is

the code

name for the latest release of the Athlon processor from AMD. Unlike the first

Athlon processor, which came in a slot design, the Thunderbird is a socket

design, fitting in the same socket type as the new AMD Duron processor. This new

socket is called Socket A 462. It can take processor speeds between 550 to 1

GHz.

The

board’s based on the VIA VT8363 (VIA Apollo KT 133) chipset, and is filled

with lots of features. First of all you can increase or decrease the CPU speed

through the BIOS in increments of 1 MHz. These adjustments can also be done

using the DIP switches on the board itself. Another unusual addition in the

board is that it has two extra IDE ports, making a total of four. Two of these

support ATA/100 devices, and the other two take ATA 66/33 devices.

The board has two USB ports at the back and an additional

module of five that can be added later. It also provides an AGP Pro/4x port,

which can take in high-end graphics cards. In addition to this, the board has

all the regular external interface ports like serial, parallel, all of which are

onboard and color coded, making setup very easy.

The motherboard has five PCI slots. It doesn’t support ISA

slots, so if you plan to upgrade your machine then the old ISA cards would be of

no use. The motherboard has onboard sound, which can be disabled if you want to

use your own PCI or AMR sound card. An AMR slot is available for these. It also

has 3 DIMM slots that can house up to 1.5 GB PC 133/100 SDRAM or VC133 SDRAM.

We checked out the board with a Duron 700 MHz processor, 128

MB RAM, and a Creative Graphics Blaster Extreme display card. We used Business

Winstone 99 to test normal everyday applications and got a score of 24.5, which

is very good, considering that this is an entry-level configuration these days.

Then, of course, if you need more processing power later, you can upgrade to the

Athlon (if it’s available in the market at that time), and a better display

card to give you a powerful system.

It comes with a CD that contains motherboard drivers, Win

95/98, Ultra 100 IDE controller, audio drivers, PC Cillin’98, Adobe Acrobat

and Cyberlink audio/video software. It also comes with a PC-health monitoring

software. Though it’s priced slightly high, it’s rich set of features and

good performance balance it out.

Sachin Makhija at PCQ Labs