AT7 vs A7V
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on June 6, 2002 at 4:02:40 PM
got apex? (nope) has a shootout of the KT333 boards from Abit and Asus.
The ABIT AT7 MAX is innovative in its design, offers great performance when compared to earlier generation chipsets and it has a grip of features chucked onboard. ASUS, with the A7V333, offers even better performance, a tried and true approach to the board layout, outstanding stability and a handful of onboard devices. The AT7 owns the comparison where overclocking is concerned, as it offers greater tweakability of the system BIOS, and at the end of the day was able to push our chip the farthest. ASUS does offer overclocking toggles in their BIOS but not to the extent that the AT7 offers. The A7V333 was, however, a much more stable board in our testing, but this may be a case of just a bad board from ABIT and not indicative of a standard off the shelf retail AT7. Speaking of stability, on a couple of instances we lost power to the AT7's USB bus and thus we were unable to access the BIOS because there are no legacy PS/2 keyboard or mouse ports. So if you find yourself in a situation where your USB input device fails, you can not just slap in an older keyboard or test the USB ports functionality by swapping the keyboard to the legacy port.
The ABIT AT7 MAX is innovative in its design, offers great performance when compared to earlier generation chipsets and it has a grip of features chucked onboard. ASUS, with the A7V333, offers even better performance, a tried and true approach to the board layout, outstanding stability and a handful of onboard devices. The AT7 owns the comparison where overclocking is concerned, as it offers greater tweakability of the system BIOS, and at the end of the day was able to push our chip the farthest. ASUS does offer overclocking toggles in their BIOS but not to the extent that the AT7 offers. The A7V333 was, however, a much more stable board in our testing, but this may be a case of just a bad board from ABIT and not indicative of a standard off the shelf retail AT7. Speaking of stability, on a couple of instances we lost power to the AT7's USB bus and thus we were unable to access the BIOS because there are no legacy PS/2 keyboard or mouse ports. So if you find yourself in a situation where your USB input device fails, you can not just slap in an older keyboard or test the USB ports functionality by swapping the keyboard to the legacy port.