BIOS

BIOS

The A7V133 BIOS remains practically unchanged from the A7V; the main addition is (for overclockers at least) easily the inclusion of clock multiplier adjustment for overclocking your CPU. Also, bus speeds of 90, 95, and 100-166MHz (in 1MHz increments) are available within BIOS.

BIOS Main Menu

Set that to optimal for best performance

Since the KT133A supports asynchronous operation, PC133 memory can run at 133MHz while the system bus runs at 200MHz. Simply use the "DRAM Frequency" setting to do this. Or, you can use the "CPU Frequency" setting to adjust the system bus synchronously with all available bus speeds (the KT133A chipset only supports synchronous mode at speeds of 133MHz and up).

Mmm, multipliers!

Chip Configuration submenu

For multiplier adjustment, settings from 5.5x-12.5x are available in 0.5 increments, CPU voltages supported range from 1.10V-1.85V in 0.5V increments. For added performance, we also suggest you set the "System Performance Setting" to optimal; we noticed a nice performance improvement with this setting enabled. Finally, we also recommend updating to the 1002T BIOS or later; we noticed a substantial performance increase with this version in comparison to the initial BIOS release.

Hardware Monitor Menu

Overclocking

In our last ASUS review, the CUSL2-C, readers informed us of a small limitation of the motherboard when overclocking. Unfortunately, if you are running your overclocked CPU at a speed that requires a core voltage higher than the default, you might run into problems successfully rebooting your system. This is because once you shut down your computer the motherboard returns the voltage to default. ASUS owners refer to this flaw on forums as the cold boot problem and it can only be remedied by modifying your processor.

In our overclocking testing we noticed the same problem with our A7V133. Fortunately, we were able to overclock the system bus on our motherboard to 150MHz before this became a problem.