BIOS/Overclocking

BIOS interface

The K7V shares a similar BIOS interface to the one used on ASUS 820 series motherboards. While we were initially a bit skeptical of the design due to the different layout, we've quickly become accustomed to it. Navigating the menus was a bit frustrating at first but once everything is memorized getting from menu to menu is a breeze.

BIOS Main Menu

Adjusting the clock speed

The interface has also been tweaked since it made its initial debut in the K7M. The K7M BIOS required lots of scrolling to get to some features, and some settings were buried underneath menus and submenus. With the interface tweaks scrolling has been kept to a minimum and the number of submenus has slightly decreased. The majority of the settings you'll need to adjust can be found under the "Advanced" menu of the BIOS.

Tweaking bus speeds

Adjusting the CPU voltage

Like recent ASUS BIOS releases, the K7V BIOS also includes a help menu on the right side of the screen.

AGP/Memory settings

Hardware monitoring menu

Overclocking

The K7V comes with a wide range of features of benefit to the hardcore overclocker. For instance, the K7V supports a wide range of bus speeds in BIOS: 90, 92, 95, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 110, 112, 115, 117, 120, 122, 124, 127, 130, 133, 136, 140, 145, 150, and 155MHz. As an added backup, the K7V comes with DIP switches which can also be used to manipulate bus speeds, although this solution doesn't support as many bus speeds as the system BIOS.

To aid overclocking even further, the K7V also allows for CPU voltage manipulation inside BIOS. (Voltage can also be adjusted via jumpers) This is another feature we're sure many Athlon overclockers will appreciate.

Other notable features supported by the K7V are I/O voltage manipulation for increasing the voltage supplied to PCI/AGP devices or the KX133 chipset/RAM and, as we mentioned earlier, the ability to run system memory synchronous with your system bus or slightly faster than (asynchronous) of bus speed. Options available are 3:3 or 4:3.

As you probably know, there isn't much headroom in the Athlons EV6 bus when it comes to overclocking. The highest setting we could achieve with our Athlon 750 and the K7V was 105MHz, and even then we were unable to complete a few benchmark tests. (CPU voltage was 1.75V) At 107MHz we were able to run a few tests in Quake 3, but this setting wasn't stable enough to complete the entire suite of tests.

For comparison, we tried overclocking with the same CPU on the MSI K7 Pro, and were only able to run the bus stable at 102MHz.