X-bit labs

ASUS A7V880 Mainboard Review. First Look at VIA KT880 Chipset (page 6)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

The PCB used as a basis for ASUS A7V880 looks quite original and has nothing in common with any other mainboards. In fact, this is not at all surprising, because VIA KT880 chipset is not pin-compatible with the previous VIA’s North Bridges. Since there are no additional onboard controllers the PCB design is pretty simple is hardly has any significant drawbacks or bottlenecks. The only thing we were quite upset with was the location of the FDD connector, which was placed in front of the PCI slots, so that the FDD cable will always be in the way either for the PCI or the AGP cards.

Note also that the mainboard doesn’t require any PSUs with an additional 12V connector. There is simply no four-pin 12V ATX power supply connector on ASUS A7V880 mainboard at all. The chipset North Bridge is covered with a massive passive heatsink, which is more than enough to ensure proper cooling of the product, since VIA KT880 doesn’t generate too much heat.

The processor voltage regulator on ASUS A7V880 is designed according to a two-channel scheme. By the way, since we came to speak about the CPU voltage regulator, I would like to mention also that there are quite a few empty spots right around the area where the CPU power supply circuitry is located. We managed to find four empty spots intended for MOSFETs, three spots for large capacitors, and more than a dozen of spots for smaller electronic components, such as resistors and small capacitors. Frankly speaking, I got the impression that ASUS engineers suddenly decided to act economically ad removed the “unnecessary” elements from the PCB at all. However, this hasn’t affected the mainboard stability at all, I should say. At least I haven’t revealed any problems with the mainboard performance during our test session.

I would like to devote special attention to the connectors laid out on the back panel of the mainboard. There is one parallel and one serial port (the second serial port is also laid out on the PCB, but the pin-connector is not available in the corresponding spot), four USB 2.0 ports (the other four ports are laid out as pin-connectors on the PCB), RJ45 network connector, three audio jacks and a coaxial SPDIF Out.

The overclocking friendly features supported by this mainboard are also of interest to us. The thing is that the peculiarities of the VIA KT880 chipset, namely the possibility to clock the AGP and PCI buses asynchronously, ASUS A7V880 may turn into an overclockers’ favorite product, just like any other mainboards based on the same chipset, actually. Especially, since overclocking with an nForce2 mainboard always prepares some unpleasant surprises, such as BIOS resetting, floating frequency values, etc.