X-bit labs

ASUS A7V880 Mainboard Review. First Look at VIA KT880 Chipset (page 5)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/19/2004 | 09:05 AM ]

Of course, ASUS A7V880 will be able to work with any Socket A CPUs with 200/266/333/400MHz bus frequency without any problems. Also this mainboard will have no issues supporting DDR266/DDR333/DDR400 SDRAM. The mainboard can work with the memory in synchronous and asynchronous modes, and allows using single-channel 64bit and dual-channel 128bit configurations. The BIOS Setup of ASUS A7V880 is based on AMI microcode, boasts sufficient flexibility of the memory configuring options and allows adjusting all the key timings. Note that just like with the NVIDIA nForce2 mainboards the synchronous mode is the highest performance mode for the VIA KT880, that is when the memory working in the dual-channel configuration supports the same frequency as the FSB.

By the way, note that unlike NVIDIA nForce2 based mainboards, ASUS A7V880 features 4 memory slots, 2 for each channel, which makes its much easier to upgrade the memory subsystem towards larger overall memory capacity.

As for other expansion options, ASUS A7V880 doesn’t prepare any surprises for us. The mainboard is equipped with 5 PCI and 1 AGP 8x slot, which will remain demanded even despite the fact that PCI Express x16 is coming out very soon now. The owners of Socket A systems will hardly hunt for the top VGA cards preferring more attractive solutions from the price-to-performance point of view. Just like many other ASUS mainboards, the new A7V880 features the company’s unique brand name WiFi slot intended for wireless network cards from ASUS. This way, ASUS A7V880 owners will have an easy option to expand the functionality of their mainboards in terms of 802.11a/b and later 802.11g standards support at a very low expense.

Due to the VIA VT8237 South Bridge, ASUS A7V880 supports two Serial ATA-150 channels and allows creating RAID 0 or RAID 1 arrays. Also the mainboard features 8 USB 2.0 ports, with four ports laid out on the mainboard rear panel, and four represented as ready to work PCB connectors.

As for the integrated sound, ASUS A7V880 features a six-channel ADI AD1888 AC’97 sound codec with SPDIF Out support (you can see its coaxial connector as well as three regular audio jacks on the rear panel of the board). Although the manufacturer considers this codec a not very expensive one, it still supports the brand new AC97 2.3 standard, which makes it much easier to connect all external audio devices to the system. Also due to the thoroughly laid out analog sound tract, we revealed no issues with the performance of the onboard sound solution by ASUS A7V880.

Just like the majority of contemporary mainboards, ASUS A7V880 is equipped with an Ethernet controller from Marvell, which also supports the technology called Virtual Cable Tester. You can read more about this technology on Marvell’s official web-site. In our turn, we will just point out the major idea behind this technology. Virtual Cable Tester allows tracking all most common problems with the Ethernet cable connected to the chip. Among these problems we could list the following: torn spots or dead shorts (the technology detects the problem with 1 meter precision), pair swaps, pair polarity problems and a few others.