I need some opinions on buying an Asus A7V133 for $55.

digitalwanderer

My son's pc lost it's motherboard this weekend, (so did his sisters and my friend, it was a VERY bad geek weekend for me!), so I'm hunting about for some parts to make him something that'll work and I came across this Asus A7V133 for $55us that tempts me to get it and give him my CUSL2-C so I can start playing around with some Athlon goodness.

My questions:

I know nothing about AMD mobo's and have no idea what range of CPU's this board would take. Could someone give me a quick idiots guide on these here AMD things? What's the highest end chip I could put in it, what kind of memory would it take? Stuff like that would really help before I go and do something stupid and just pick up an old Slot1 somewhere and toss my faithful old PII350 in it.

sinjin

i have a Athlon Tbird 1.2@1.33 (10x133) in my A7V133....according to asus.com you can have up to a Tbird 1.3 in there, but the latest couple of bios revisions add Athlon XP support...haven't tried one yet, though in a couple days i'll have a 1900+ to try out (thx Zardon).

the A7V133 is limited to only sdram (pc100/133)..and its KT133 chipset is growing long in the tooth.

also, the onboard Promise raid controller is gay...you won't be able to control your stripe/cluster size if you decide to array your harddrives...unless you mod you bios or format the stripe with an extra winXP drive. if you don't use the raid option, you at least have a couple extra ata133 ide ports at your disposal.

it also has onboard AC'97 sound...yay.

its a good, solid board though...fully configurable with multiplier and voltage jumpers or you can go jumperless and config via the bios.

55 bucks...why not.

edited: can't spell worth sh1t

Vaporizer

I had a A7V133 with my old TB1200 and it worked very well (i have a A7V266-E now) also my friend has a A7V133 and he is running a XP 1900+ on it without any problems. I had Winbond Memory and he has some noname memory (SDR PC133) so i think it is compatible with most sticks.

digitalwanderer

For the feedback but in a late-night, herbally-induced fit-o-craziness I ordered an Asus P3B-F slot1. I wimped out and figured my PII350 would be good enough for what I needed the box for now, and then I'd have something to hand down either my PIII800 or 1Ghz celery to later down the road when I upgrade one of them. (I have a nice slocket w/voltage regulator rotting away on a shelf. )

Thanks again for the input, it was v. helpful.

JavaFox

digitalwanderer, some revisions of the board in question --A7V133- can take an Athlon XP with a BIOS update. Look for Revision 1.05 or newer.

However, you can hop over to NewEgg and get a brand spankin' new ECS K7S5A --which a lot of people have had excellent luck with-- for a few dollars more. I've owned two of said board, and it's great. The A7V133 does more overclocking options, though.

The K7S5A is decidedly no-frills. No overclocking options. Nothing fancy. But it works, and it works well. It'll take an AXP, and supports both PC133 and PC2100 RAM (not at the same time, of course).

JavaFox

Oh. Nevermind.

Silentst2000

Good choice.

I doubt that a7v133 would have taken an xp anyways.

digitalwanderer

I thought it was pretty decent too, considering how f-ing difficult it is now to find a decent slot1 board off of pricewatch. (You go trying it sometime!) I ended up spending a couple too many hours bouncing from merchant site to review sites, and finally just gave up and settled on the P3B-F. Fortunately this morning I still felt pretty good about it. (I REALLY like the idea of being able to pass on one of my CPU's to my son later, gives me more arguments for the wife towards a CPU upgrade. )

Just to finish up the story proper here, (it's also detailed in another thread somewhere), I also picked up a couple of other things to fix his pc up with. He had a cheapy LX board with integrated sound & graphics, so I had to get him a sound & viddy card unless I wanted to use some 3 year old junk in his box. (Which I really don't want to do!) So I picked up a Visiontech 64MB GF2 GTS-V for $50, an old Hercules Fortissimo for $25, and since it was cheap and his old 4.7Gb probably wouldn't cut it for long I picked up a 40GB Maxtor 5200 for $63. Looking at the bits I'd ordered; I suddenly realized I really didn't want to hook all that up to a cheap-assed, used power supply...so I hunted up a new enermax 300w for $40 shipped.

So I ended up blowing about $240 last night picking up a new mobo for my son's pc...but I think he's really getting a lot more than $240 worth of upgrades out of it.

BTW-Which is better? An Abit 64MB GF2 T400 (MX400 w/tv-out) or a Visiontek Xtasy 5632 Geforce2 GTS-V 64MB DDR? I'm currently using the MX400 on the box I'm typing on, but I'm planning on keeping the better card in this box 'tween the two and kicking the lesser to my son. (He doesn't need as much power for "Nicktoons Racing" and "HotWheels" as I do for UT and SoF. ) The MX400 is no slouch, it's clocked at 240/420 and beat out my 32MB OEM radeon DDR as the card that stays when I got my GF3...but I really don't have enough depth to my nVidia knowledge to know which is the better card yet. (I also haven't modded and oc'ed the GTS yet..... )

It was a fun night, my wife is gonna kill me.


BTW2-There's another thread about my "which is best" viddy card here.

BTW3-No, I'm not exactly sane by the more popular definitions of the word.

EDITED BITS: A little nip here, a bit of a tuck there....

Vaporizer

JavaFox

Revision 1.05 or newer will take an AXP with a BIOS update. Straight from the horse's mouth.

Vaporizer

Thats for the 2100+, my friend is running a 1900+ with a 1.03 board.