Socket-A Chipset Comparison - April 2001

Our Biggest Complaint

We did run into one problem, in spite of the miraculous alignment of the moons, and that was the fact that ASUS, for whatever reason, has decided that clock multiplier control isn't necessary on their newest boards.

The A7V133, ASUS' KT133A based offering, does have multiplier adjustment available through the BIOS unfortunately the same cannot be said about the A7M266 and A7A266.  Hopefully later revisions of these boards will have the settings but for whatever reasons the current revisions do not.  It could be pressure by AMD that is forcing ASUS to remove multiplier control from the A7M266 board that happens to be based on an AMD chipset, however this is highly unlikely since AMD has already informed us that they do not plan on preventing users from overclocking their CPUs through the use of the "bridges" present on the surface of the chip.

Per the instructions we provided in our recent 133MHz FSB overclocking investigation, in order to cope with the issue of not being able to adjust the clock multiplier on two of the three boards we used we had to modify the bridges on a 1000/100 Athlon CPU to effectively make it a 1000/133 Athlon-C CPU (by changing the multiplier from 10.0x to 7.5x). 

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