ASUS A7V600: Feature-Laden – Value-Priced
by Wesley Fink on August 17, 2003 10:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
If your goal is top-notch Athlon performance, you should not be looking at the ASUS A7V600 or any KT600 board that we have tested. However, if you are looking for a solid and reliable Athlon board with the latest features, then the ASUS A7V600 should definitely be on your shopping list. There is no doubt that the KT600 boards, in general, and the ASUS A7V600, in particular, bring great value to the mix.Boards based on the single-channel nForce2 400 chipset cost about the same and perform much better than the KT600. Our concern with the nForce2 400, however, is that it is only available from a few manufacturers. It is also stripped of features when compared to most KT600 boards. Perhaps this is where the KT600 scores a win, because the feature set of the KT600 is even better and more contemporary than the top-of-the-line nForce2 Ultra 400 boards that we have evaluated.
There is also the nagging question of what VIA is thinking these days. With almost a year to bring a competent top-performing Athlon chipset to market, we are shocked to see that VIA is now the only chipset manufacturer refusing to implement a PCI/AGP frequency lock option in their designs. NVIDIA, SiS, and Intel all provide this option in their current chipsets. If VIA plans to continue marketing AMD and Intel chipsets in the future, they will have to add the AGP/PCI lock feature to be competitive with other chipset manufacturers. In addition, it is perplexing at the very least that almost a year after the nForce2 introduction, VIA is still not able to produce a board that performs as well. We can only hope that VIA has some major surprises in the works for Athlon64 and Intel Prescott, or we will see the VIA name relegated to the bargain basement.
The ASUS A7V600 is feature-laden, and an excellent value at its selling price. It is the only KT600 board that we have tested to provide Gigabit LAN and a slot for a wireless transmitter. It is not a blistering performer, even compared to other KT600 boards, but it is a solid and trouble-free motherboard, and one of the best overclockers among the KT600 boards. If your needs are best served by the latest top-notch features in a solid, reliable board from a top-tier manufacturer, then the ASUS A7V600 is your choice. Did we also say it’s available at a bargain price?
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
20 Comments
View All Comments
unclefreaky - Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - link
on your asus a7v600 review and testing what where all the bios settings on it. i have one and a radeon 9800pro and it will not run it beeps and no boot i can get to bios but not to windows ive trie everything with no luck and tried other videocards but no luck unless they run at 4x agpim not the only person with this issue and it would help out greatly if you could provide those bois settings we get no reply from asus tech and ati and via havent suggested anything helpful
please help the world and i on this issue
Anonymous User - Monday, September 29, 2003 - link
Somebody asked who uses these motherboards. Well, I've got the Asus A7V600 and until now I haven't seen any motive to feel bad about it. I've read some articles, all of them say the board has a poor performance. 'It's very disappointing' it's said. So, I went to see the benchmarks' results and the difference between the best scores (Nforce 2 based boards included) and the Asus board. I've found it's usually less than 5/6%. Does anybody really notice the difference when running any application or game? What about stability? Isn't there any kind of score for stability? If my system crashes I'll certainly notice. And I haven't had any crash till now, even with my Barton 2500+ running at 2.2 GHz. By the way, in Portugal, Asus A7V600 costs about 30% less than Asus A7N8X Deluxe and about 40% less than MSI KT6 Delta. And the Oscar goes to...sprockkets - Monday, August 25, 2003 - link
Whoops on the post. According to the instructions, you setup raid on the built in bios for it by via.According to Intel, kernel 2.4.20 has built in support for SATA drives, at least for their 865 chipset, but should work fine for VIA.
sprockkets - Monday, August 25, 2003 - link
KF - Friday, August 22, 2003 - link
If Windows can use any HD without a HD controller driver, it is a new one on me. Same for linux. This goes for SCSI as well as IDE. What Windows can do is use a driver that is built in, and some common controllers (like VIA, SIS, Nvidia)emulate a basic old HD controller that goes way back, although to get higher performance the manufacturers provide other drivers. Adaptec, Promise and Highpoint need unique drivers even for their straight HD controllers, let alone the RAID versions, although Windows XP at least has lots of drivers for these. I believe linux is the same. That would make all HD controllers "just typical cheap Taiwanese software based crap."These mobo reviews virtually never check to see if the RAID works even in Windows. No one knows for sure what functions are done in software; people are just guessing or assuming. In general, manufacturers only provide drivers for Windows based systems, and some individual has to write a driver for linux.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, August 20, 2003 - link
SuSE linux like windows should be able to raid it without hardware support, though can't say for sure?Anonymous User - Wednesday, August 20, 2003 - link
Is the Serial RAID hardware or software based? I mean can I configure it via BIOS and install some odd OS like Linux or SCO unix that will just see 1 hard drive and have it work and copy the data to the second drive like real hardware raid? or is this just typical cheap taiwanese software based crap?And also you say its value based but what happens when I pair this up with a geforce video card? wouldn't any possible saving of money disappear into that to the point I would of been better off with a Nforce2 and get the extra performance to boot. When you claim/think about a value based PC's you gotta look at the overall picture of the machine you are building.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 19, 2003 - link
Jeff, stop posting, it's already known fact that Gigabyte's nForce2 U400 and other U400 motherboards perform exactly the same as Epox and ASUS's boards. Your request is useless, waste's Anandtech's time, and is getting old quite frankly.Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 19, 2003 - link
#10 has a very good point. I suggest skipping the "tags" instead to make room for some real information. The ones like "Purple, Practical, AND Performance!" feels a little bit like the cheesy article tags over at Toms Hardware. Though theirs are probably unbeatable due to the sometimes apparent language translation factor.Anonymous User - Monday, August 18, 2003 - link
just a minor request - please put the chipset somewhere in the review title like you guys used to - it makes searching through old reviews MUCH easier (ie searching for all KT600 reviews)