Dom

This review came about as somewhat of a fluke, since this wasn't the motherboard that I had planned to get for my bro's PC. I was actually looking for an Epox 8RDA+ as an nForce2 Ultra400 replacement for the already installed Asus A7V266-E that was performing quite well in some respects considering it's age, but we wanted more - especially since the new Radeon9500Pro, RAM and AthlonXP1800 were showing much promise in the overclocking department, and certain benchmarks scores were decidedly on the low side.

The A7V foiled our overclocking attempts on several fronts by not having enough frequncy dividers for the AGP/PCI to FSB ratios, not having enough voltage adjustments (and none for the DDR or AGP/IO voltage, pretty much only the CPU), left us with a max FSB of 140Mhz stable giving a CPU speed of a little over 1.6Ghz (11.5x140=1610Mhz). At first, this seemed like the max the CPU would do at this multiplier since the temps were climbing to around 130F using a SwiftechMCX462 and a screaming Vantec Tornado fan. We were also hesitant to unlock the processor, in part because it's not a quick or simple process for what seemed like a dubious gain at this point. The RAM was purring along happily at even the highest FSB we managed on this mobo at the most aggressive settings that were available - 154MHz at CAS2-2-2-5-1; nothing to sneeze at, and SiSandra was reporting a 97% efficiency of the bus's max theorhetical throughput. Very good there indeed. 3dMark around this point was a tad over 1900 - completely underwhelming for this vid card and CPU combo.

Head over to OCPrices.com for the full review