Introduction

The A7V has landed!

Over the past two months, we've received more requests to review the ASUS A7V than any other motherboard based on the KT133 chipset. In fact, the A7V is currently the top searched for motherboard on FiringSquad - more so than ABIT's legendary BH6 and BP6 BX-based motherboards!

After months of waiting, we can finally say we have an A7V, and ours is equipped with dipswitches for adjusting the CPU clock multiplier!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this craze, it all began last June at Computex 2000 in Taipei, Taiwan, when motherboard manufacturer Legend QDI announced that its KinetiZ 7T motherboard would offer clock multiplier adjustment via jumpers.

At the time, it was assumed all retail Thunderbird and Duron processors had their clock multiplier locked straight from the factory, but it turns out that many processors have hit retail shelves without this "feature."

In any case, when we initially heard the claims from QDI we brushed them off - in our opinion, actions always speak louder than words. Since no independent third party was able to back up QDI's claims, we assumed AMD's Thunderbird and Duron processors would require unconventional methods to adjust the clock multiplier, much like the Athlon classic did when it was originally launched last year.

Everything changed when Tom's Hardware Guide published their revealing article on overclocking the Thunderbird and Duron processors with the ASUS A7V. Not only had an independent third party been able to overclock their CPUs, they'd done it with a motherboard made from ASUS, a name any hardware enthusiast could easily recognize and respect!

Not only was the overclock successful, a substantial increase was made by adjusting just a few dipswitches. Four Durons reached 950MHz (from 650 and 700MHz) and his Thunderbird clocked up to 1.1GHz! (From 1.0GHz)

Sure, flipping dipswitches is inconvenient when you're used to adjusting settings in system BIOS, but compared to the older methods of Athlon overclocking (soldering resistors or installing a Golden Fingers Device) pushing a few switches is a piece of cake!