Introduction
Introduction
My old setup consisting of an Asus K7V (KX133), Classic Athlon K7 650 @ 900 MHz have been dying to be be upgraded for a long time, but as there haven't been any obvious solutions, I have continued on the old, 'slow' platform. That was until the AMD Thunderbird AXIA steppings came along. A 1000 MHz chip that is almost guaranteed to run at 1.4 GHz + and that at a price less than $200 - that meant that now was the time.
Right, with CPU in hand, there was only one other (important) thing to consider: what motherboard to get. Should I go with the highly popular (and proven) KT133A platform, or was it time to take a walk down DDR alley. After some serious consideration (and hair pulling!), I decided on the DDR platform. This was not a decision based on a lot of scientific fact and mumbo jumbo, but more a decision based upon: why not!
Although I know had decided on the DDR platform, I still had a serious matter to decide on: should I go for the KT266, AMD760 or the Ali Magik1 chipset. After the recent reports and findings on the KT266 chipset over at OCWorkBench and AnandTech that chipset didn't seem like a viable option - so that was pretty much out of the picture. And from what I have read on these aforementioned (and other) sites, it seemed that the AMD760 chipset was the stronger of the two. So the AMD760 it was.
The reason for choosing the Asus board out of 'all' the AMD760 boards out there was due to the fact that it was readily available, came at a reasonable price, and that it sported almost all of the features I wanted. And on top of that I have always considered Asus products to be top notch quality products with which you basically can't go wrong. This proved to be true with this board as well...
The package
Here is what I got with my board:
User's Manual
Support CD (with drivers, Asus PC Probe etc)
UltraDMA/66/100 Cable
IDE Cable
Floppy Cable
2-Ports USB Bracket
Your basic run-of-the-mill motherboard accessories so to speak.
Price
I paid about USD 230 for it, but you have to remember that this is in a country where 25% VAT (tax) is added on top of all products (Sweden). And the board was only about USD 20 more expensive than an Abit KT7A-Raid. US people should be able to find it at a price around USD 160-200 (the lowest price in our Overclocking Equipment Pricelist is about USD 155). Europeans should expect to pay somewhere in the neighbourhood of USD 200+.
Now it's time to get some more information on what the board consists of, so we're moving on to the specs...
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