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Overclocking and Stability
One of the most interesting things about the on-paper specs of this motherboard is the wide range of FSB options. Historically, Athlon overclocking via the FSB has been dissapointing and to get any decent speed increase has required a multiplier change via a GFD device such as the few we compare here. Jim's Athlon 500 runs stably at 700 using a GFD, so I thought it a good chip to test FSB increases with. Sadly, I was unable to get the board stable above 107MHz FSB using that chip at a base speed of 500MHz or 650MHz, and another 550MHz Athlon I have here showed identical results. In fact, Asus have a feature whereby the board will reset itself to default if it is overclocked too high. It does this so subtly that I didn't even realise at first that it was doing it at any speed over 107MHz FSB and was confused by the lack of increased speed. I set it to 115MHz at one point and was rewarded with a blank screen. The manual states that you should just turn it off and it will reset and restart normally. It didn't. I left it turned off for a few minutes, no joy. Normally at this point you would clear the CMOS, but on my example the pins for the clear-CMOS jumper were not on the board - the solder pads were there, but no jumper. You could short it with a screwdriver if you were feeling brave, but I'm clueless as to why Asus would neglect this feature. I tried powering the machine up with no CPU and a few other tricks, but eventually had to leave the machine off overnight to get it to wake up.

Regardless, even at 107MHz FSB there was only a very minor speed increase anyway, so it looks like GFD's are still the only way to go. Overall, this is dissapointing - the Epox EP-7KXA ran stably at 115MHz FSB in this same configuration for a few hours with no errors. Still, even 115MHz is uninspiring for consumers raised on a diet of massively overclocked BX-based motherboards. This lack of FSB-based overclocking may be related to the Athlon itself, rather than the chipset or the motherboard implementation of it. AMD have announced plans for a 133MHz-FSB Athlon variant soon, which will presumably be expected to work on boards such as the K7V. Perhaps with these chips we will see stability at higher FSB's.

Boosting the voltage, which the Asus allows in the BIOS, did not help in this instance. There is also a jumper to boost VIO voltage, the voltage to memory, PCI/AGP slots and the chipset itself - again, this had no noticeable effect.

Having said all that, the Asus performed flawlessly once it booted. I had no problems at 107MHz FSB or at the default 100MHz during the benchmarking, a couple of weeks of general usage and some hardcore gaming. Asus have a reputation for build quality and stability - this unit does not let them down there.

Performance
The all-important factor. I compared The K7V with Asus's previous offering, the K7M, as well as my current recommended Athlon board, the Epox EP-7KXA. The Epox is based on the same KX133 chipset as the K7V. The testbed consisted of an Athlon 650 and 500, 128MB of KingMax PC133 SDRAM and a Diamond Viper V770U at default clock. This is all wrapped up in an AOpen HX-45 case with a Leadman LP6100 400W Athlon-approved power supply. At 100MHz the ram was run at CAS2. I used the asynchronous memory feature of the two KX133-based boards to run the memory at 133MHz for an additional set of tests, this time at CAS3.

First up, SiSoft Sandra. The CPU scores were exactly the same across the three boards, as you'd expect, so not much point putting a graph up. The memory scores tell a different story:

Sandra shows the K7V with a clear advantage over the Epox. I'm not convinced that Sandra isn't misreporting the Epox as overly low, though. Let's see what a real-world benchmark looks like. In this case, MadOnion's 3DMark2000.

Woah, love those big graphs. :) Ok, in this instance the KX133 boards came out pretty much even at 100MHz. When the 133 Mhz memory setting is used, the Epox is a tiny bit ahead of the Asus, but only a few percentage points - I'm sure with a bit of BIOS/driver tweaking the Asus would pull even. Both are noticeably faster than the AMD750-based K7M.

Conclusions
So. Does the Asus K7V topple my previous recommended Athlon motherboard, the Epox EP-7KXA? In terms of sheer performance we've seen that there's not much between them. Price-wise, there's a big difference at the moment because the K7V is brand new while the Epox has been out for a little while. Still, Eyo have the Epox listed as AUD$73 cheaper - definitely nothing to sniff at. Feature-wise they're very similar again, the Epox having an ISA slot which is not present on the Asus, the Asus having in-BIOS voltage adjustment, for example.

Forgive me if I seem to be concentrating on the negative - I'm not saying this board isn't a quality unit. I'm sure if you bought it you would be very happy with it - it offers a decent array of features, performs acceptably and seems very stable. However, it doesn't bring anything new to the Athlon motherboard arena, it's (currently) a little pricey and the layout could be better. I think for now my recommendation is unchanged.