If you were to send ASUS' customer service an e-mail circa Athlon "Classic" launch time and asked for information about their K7M motherboard, you would have been told, "we're sorry, but we don't know what you're talking about." At the time, ASUS was trying to protect their relationship with Intel and didn't foresee the popularity that the Athlon was able to quickly gain. When VIA released their KX133 chipset, ASUS was immediately on the scene with their K7V. Now that the KT133 has propagated onto the market, ASUS has crafted a full-fledged battleship of a motherboard, rivaled only by ABIT's KT7-RAID in features and performance.

At 9.6"x12," the A7V is the same size as FIC's AZ-11 motherboard. Instead of leaving massive amounts of blank PCB space though, ASUS has completely populated their board with features in a very neat and orderly fashion. As with the AZ-11, we had no problem fitting the A7V into any of our test systems. The 1xAGP Pro/5xPCI/1xAMR configuration is ideal for anyone without a need for ISA connectivity.