Asus A7V

Last month, Asus' CUSL2 (reviewed issue 75, p133) walked away with the coveted Labs Winner award, and this month the company's offering is also bursting with features - and a price to match. The A7V offers four IDE channels, two of which support UltraDMA/100, while two support UltraDMA/66. This allows up to eight drives to be connected, but we were disappointed by the lack of RAID support. An extra three USB ports are also included and a further two can be connected to a second header on the board for a total of seven.

Expansion potential is even better - the A7V is one of only two boards this month to feature an AGP Pro slot. It also has five PCI slots and an AMR slot. A small riser board holds most of the capacitors and power regulators that would normally be dotted around the CPU socket, providing space for larger heatsinks that are becoming necessary to combat the increased heat output from the new high-speed Athlons. The rest of the components are well placed, giving easy access to all slots.

As with all the motherboards on test, it's not necessary to fiddle with jumpers or dip switches to alter the CPU settings. The BIOS not only allows the FSB to be pushed up to 145MHz, but the voltage can also be adjusted up to 1.85V. While this isn't as extensive as Abit's KT7-RAID, which allows up to 155MHz and 2.05V, Asus can add this functionality through a future BIOS update.

Unfortunately, the price tag of £118 counts against the A7V - especially as it doesn't support RAID. If you're after the extra IDE support, the Gigabyte 7ZXR is the board to buy.