ASUS A7V8X (KT400): The Athlon Gets DDR400

Final Words

Our first impression of the ASUS A7V8X was very good. We were pleased to see so many interesting integrated features like Serial ATA RAID and Gigabit Ethernet for one of the first KT400 motherboards on the market. The combination of these features and ASUS's positive reputation for reliable motherboards left a good taste in our mouths.

Once we started testing the A7V8X we started to see that, for the most part, the motherboard lived up to our expectations. However, clearly DDR400 performance isn't all that exciting; in fact, it falls behind its own DDR333 performance numbers in addition to other DDR333-powered boards. VIA's P4PB 400 (P4X400) Pentium 4 motherboard suffers from the same issues.

However, the ASUS A7V8X is clearly a solid DDR333 board; we were able to run all of our stress tests and benchmarks perfectly at aggressive settings such as CAS2, Turbo mode, Command Rate 1T, etc. DDR400 stability at default timings (one bank) was solid as well, but this is clearly at the expense of a performance hit (it's a minor hit though). We did encounter some pretty severe POST issues with this motherboard, but this was apparently due to an outdated BIOS. Once we flashed to the latest BIOS, all POST problems were cured, and we were able to run all of our stress tests, overclocking tests, and benchmark runs.

Soon enough we'll be seeing several other KT400 motherboards coming down the pipeline, some of which quite closely resemble the ASUS A7V8X. Gigabyte and MSI among others have their KT400 boards ready, and we'll be reviewing them very soon, so stay tuned everyone.