-- Singapore Hardware Zone -- Reviews -- Motherboards -- Asus K7M

Introduction

When my system was down about two weeks ago, I encountered some of the strangest problems, and no one would have guessed that the culprit turned out to be the CD-ROM drive. Well, I suppose I am a little wiser now, and armed with a little bit more knowledge on how to troubleshoot a certain problem. Anyway, during that time, I was more than once tempted to change my current hardware to something totally different. The AMD K7 did come across my mind since I had a lot of fun with my previous two reviews. The price of the CPU is cheap (normally below Intel CPUs of the same MHz) and it is very stable. Although Athlon motherboards are more expensive, I suppose it balances out the cheaper processor, and thus, the overall cost of the motherboard and CPU is about the same if you're buying an Intel system. On the other hand, there has also been reports of incompatibilities with GeForce graphic cards and some power supply issues.

One of the boards that I would have seriously considered if I wanted to buy an Athlon system would have definitely been the Asus K7M. I must say that this is one feature rich board, and reviewing this product was not easy. There are just quite a lot of features to test, and the review would not be complete without testing them.

The Asus K7M is one of the very first boards that support overclocking of the Athlon. It has all the overclocking features that you will ever need, from voltage control of the core to changing the front side bus. Believe it or not, there's also a jumper for changing the voltage of the chipset and DRAM from the default 3.4V to 3.56V. All this are built on-board for the overclocker, and I must say that this is a nice departure from the conservative "no overclocking" to a full fledge "overclocker's" motherboard. However, not all controls are available in the BIOS menu as Asus still prefers to stick to traditional jumpers. I suppose that reduces complexity. Anyway, the FSB selection is available in the BIOS, but voltage control can only be adjusted from jumpers on the motherboard.

The design of the board is also a little different from the other two boards which I have reviewed previously (MS-6167 and Freetech P7-F200A). The most obvious difference is in the southbridge where Asus decided to use VIA's solution instead of AMD's Viper Southbridge. The VIA 82C686A is a feature rich Southbridge that not only supports UDMA/66, but it also includes an integrated AC'97 compliant PCI audio. In some earlier tests, the VIA UDMA/66 implementation was found to be more matured than AMD's Viper southbridge. However, AMD has since released better driver support, and from then on, I find little difference in the performance. The other additional feature is the inclusion of an AMR slot for audio-modem riser cards.

If you take a closer look at the motherboard, especially at the area above the slot, you'll see that the huge silver heatsink has been removed in this newer revision. If you've read reviews of this board from other websites, you'll see pictures of a large component heatsink placed on top of the power transistors. Even boards like MS-6167 and P7-F200A have smaller heatsinks attached to each of the transistors. In revisions 1.04 and later, Asus has done away with this and has resorted to dissipating the heat through the motherboard instead. If you look on the underside of the motherboard, you'll see a huge blob of solder below these transistors, which is used like a heatsink. Here's what I mean :-

Top View

Below the transistors

The package comes in a dull looking white box without any designs whatsoever. The only thing that caught my eye was the cautionary label placed on top of the box. As with most K7 motherboards I've seen so far, this precautionary notice is almost a must. Hmm, you must be wondering what I'm talking about. Well, it is the biggest issue about K7, and it is the power supply, which should not be taken too lightly.

The entire product comes with most of the standard accessories like the floppy drive cable, UDMA/66 80-conductor IDE cable, support CD with drivers and manual. The only extra is the ASUS USB connector set for the extra 2 built-in USB ports.

The Good

The K7M board layout looks a little different from the reference design adopted by other board makers such as Microstar and Freetech. It looks like Asus did put some effort into redesigning the board, especially with the inclusion of VIA's southbridge instead of AMD's southbridge chip. If you look at some of the disk benchmarks made earlier in the MS-6167 review, you will notice that the performance is poorer than Intel's BX chipset. It doesn't make sense why a UDMA/66 interface would be defeated by the older UDMA/33. This was largely due to AMD's poor implementation of the southbridge, in addition to immature drivers. On the other hand, the VIA southbridge support of the "not so new" UDMA/66 standard is pretty good, with performances on-par or slightly better than the UDMA/33 standard. Thus, it only makes sense to couple AMD's Irongate with VIA's southbridge to bring out the best in performance.

Overclockers would be delighted to find the wide range of FSB to choose for overclocking. The FSBs in small steps of 1MHz really made overclocking a lot easier as you can finely adjust your final CPU clock until it reaches the highest possible speed. The board gives a whole new meaning to the term, "squeezing out the last drop of performance". In addition to adjusting the bus frequency, users are also able to adjust the CPU core voltage using a set of 3 jumpers located near the slot-A. These jumpers allow the user to change the CPU core voltage from 1.3V up to a whopping 2.0V. Since adjustments are made manually by jumpers, you can virtually set to any voltage without the BIOS limiting your voltage setting. Not to forget, there are also jumpers for you to alter the voltage to the chipset and DRAM, as mentioned in the earlier section. This would definitely make the board more flexible for overclocking.

An AMR slot is included in the board. This will be a standard for most newer motherboards and personally, I feel that it is an almost un-needed slot since most people I know still prefers expensive peripherals. Not many will go for soft-audio and soft-modem solutions. I guess if these are not important to you, and keeping the cost low is your top priority, the AMR slot may just come in handy.

The board's southbridge uses the highly integrated VIA 82C686A chipset which supports AC'97 compliant PCI audio. The board I received comes with an on-board AC'97 Audio CODEC using Analog Device's 3D sound chip. The audio quality is just so-so, and really not recommended for games and high-performance audio usage. The motherboard with built-in audio only costs a few dollars more, and it is definitely a good deal if you just want audio coming from your system.

USB freaks would be delighted at the additional 2 USB ports located in front of the board. Asus bundles an extra USB connector to be placed in one of the slots in your ATX casing. However, if your casing has built-in ports located in the front, that is an excellent place to use the extra ports. Unfortunately, I have yet to find such casings in the market. Wouldn't it be nice to find a casing with built-in extra USB ports and Infra-Red communication port in the front of the casing? Well, some of Creative's Blaster PCs already have such features.

The board also features hardware monitoring using the utility provided. The ASUS probe utility is pretty good and it is the same as the one which I've covered in the previous Asus P3B-F review. However, you may want to purchase the Asus P2T-Cable since the Athlon does not have an on-die temperature diode. Temperatures can only be measured by external means.

In the tests, I used AMD's K7 700MHz CPU and compared its performance with the other two boards which I have reviewed recently, Microstar's MS-6167 and Freetech's P7-F200A. Well, I guess we shall really see which is the best all-round performer.

The ZDNet benchmarks show that the Asus K7M is indeed a little more superior in terms of performance, beating both Freetech and Microstar in all CPU, FPU and Business benchmarks. The Winstone benchmark would normally not be greatly affected by the slight increase in CPU performance (as demonstrated between MS-6167 and P7-F200A), but here, we see quite a significant difference in the Winstone result. This may be due to the slightly better UDMA/66 support given by the VIA southbridge.

Wintune 98 1.0.40 Benchmarks (Windows 98)

Benchmark	K7M (700MHz)	MS-6167 (700MHz)	P7-F200A (700MHz)
CPU Integer	2142.8	2121.9	2121.6
CPU Floating Point	873.3	865.6	865.0
Video 2D	174.6	171.0	172.3
Direct 3D	168.3	168.8	168.5
Open GL	85.5	84.9	85.1
Memory	1762.8	1687.3	1694.4

Once again, the Asus K7M motherboard has demonstrated its superiority in performance over the other two contenders. What caught my eye was the staggering speed of the K7M in the memory benchmark. This could also be another reason why Winstone 99 performance was higher. Now, let's compare the K7M at different speeds.

Ziff-Davis Winbench 99 and Winstone 99 v1.1 Results (Windows 98)

Benchmark	K7M (650MHz)	K7M (700MHz)	K7M (756MHz)
CPU mark 99	61.1	64.6	69.3
FPU Winmark	3570	3850	4120
Business Winstone 99	27.9	28.7	29.1

As you can see from the benchmark above, the gain in 50 MHz between 650 and 700 is quite significant, an almost 6% increase in the CPU Mark score. However, if you overclock the 700MHz Athlon to 756MHz (108MHz x 7), you get more than 7% increase in performance. This shows that the Athlon can still pack a lot of surprises especially when it comes to overclocking the CPU. I was surprised that I could push the 700MHz CPU by another 56MHz. Gee, if I only have a 500MHz Athlon to overclock on this board, it would really be interesting to see how much stress you can put on the Irongate chipset. Don't forget, when you overclock your Athlon by changing the bus frequency, the northbridge is also overclocked. This is partly the reason why Asus decided to put a voltage control jumper for Vio, so that you can increase the voltage to the northbridge for better overclocking success and stability.

Wintune 98 1.0.40 Benchmarks (Windows 98)

Benchmark	K7M (650MHz)	K7M (700MHz)	K7M (756MHz)
CPU Integer	1989.7	2142.8	2298.8
CPU Floating Point	810.7	873.3	941.8
Video 2D	174.0	174.6	182
Direct 3D	169.1	168.3	167.2
Open GL	84.7	85.5	86.3
Memory	1641.9	1762.8	1854

Once again, we see how much faster the Athlon can go. However, I'm quite surprised that the Direct3D performance of the video dropped when the CPU speed is increased. Frankly, I have no idea how to interpret that. Anyway, the performance of the 756MHz CPU should be faster than the current 750MHz that you see in the stores. This is mainly due to the higher L2 cache speed of the 700MHz CPU. The L2 cache divider on the current 750MHz is 1/2.5 as opposed to the 700MHz CPU which is 1/2. I suppose overclocking the 700MHz CPU to 750MHz is still a better choice considering the L2 cache is faster than the 750MHz model. Then again, it really depends a lot on your luck. Now, let's take a quick look at the graphics performance.

3D Mark 99 Max Benchmarks (Windows 98) @ 640x480
(ATI Expression 2000)

Benchmark	K7M (700MHz)	MS-6167 (700MHz)	P7-F200A (700MHz)
3D Mark Results	5122	5118	5089
Synthetic CPU 3D	11363	11087	11031
Rasterizer Score	1064	1067	1064
Fill Rate	77.6	78	77.6
Fill Rate w/ Multi-Texturing	100.3	100.9	100.3

3D Mark 99 Max Benchmarks (Windows 98) @ 800x600
(ATI Expression 2000)

Benchmark	K7M (700MHz)	MS-6167 (700MHz)	P7-F200A (700MHz)
3D Mark Results	3813	3790	3830
Synthetic CPU 3D	11342	11127	11003
Rasterizer Score	993	995	993
Fill Rate	79.3	79.4	79.3
Fill Rate w/ Multi-Texturing	103.9	104.1	103.9

3D Mark 99 Max Benchmarks (Windows 98) @ 1024x768
(ATI Expression 2000)

Benchmark	K7M (700MHz)	MS-6167 (700MHz)	P7-F200A (700MHz)
3D Mark Results	2687	2646	2657
Synthetic CPU 3D	11517	11190	11146
Rasterizer Score	944	944	945
Fill Rate	81.1	81.1	81
Fill Rate w/ Multi-Texturing	106.9	106.9	106.9

Please note that all the 3D tests conducted were done using the ATI Expression 2000 32MB AGP card. As you can see, the difference in 3D performance is very minimal. However, in most cases, the K7M performed a little better than the other two boards. This is largely due to the better CPU performance as evident in the Synthetic CPU 3D scores. As with the two other boards, the AGP implementation still suffers from occasional jerkiness in the 3D Mark Game 2 benchmark. Although I would love to run some graphic tests using the latest GeForce 256 on the motherboard, I found it impossible to get any benchmarks as I encountered occasional freezes. In case you were wondering, I did not use the latest drivers for the Athlon. Anyway, I will cover this in the GeForce review.

Ziff-Davis Disk Winmark Results (Windows 98)

Benchmark	K7M (700MHz)	MS-6167 (700MHz)	P7-F200A (700MHz)
Business Disk Winmark	5580	4270	5410
High-End Disk Winmark	13900	13800	13500

The Disk Winmark results show that the K7M is again the better board in terms of performance. The results here showed that the VIA UDMA/66 support is slightly better than AMD's Viper southbridge. It may also be one of the reason why the K7M's Winstone results were slightly higher than MS-6167 and P7-F200A.

Motherboard Specifications
Processor	AMD K7 Athlon Processors (500Mhz - 750MHz or higher)
Chipset	AMD-751 Irongate Chipset (Northbridge) 200MHz EV6 System Interface speed 100MHz SDRAM 1x/2x AGP VIA 82C686A Southbridge & Super I/O UDMA 33/66 ACPI, SMBus Integrated AC' 97 Compliant PCI Audio Supports FSB settings of 90, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109. 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 133, 140, 150 MHz
Cache memory	CPU Built-in 128KB L1 & 512KB L2 cache
System Memory	3 x 168-pin 3.3v PC100 SDRAM DIMM support Supports 8/16/32/64/128/256 MB DIMM Module Supports 168-pin unbuffered PC100/PC133 SDRAM (Supports ECC, 1-bit Error Code Correct function) Supports up to 768MB of memory size
PCI IDE	2 X PCI Bus Master UDMA/66 IDE ports (up to 4 ATAPI Devices) Support for PIO Mode 0-4, UDMA/33, UDMA/66 IDE & ATAPI CD-ROM
I/O Interface	1x floppy port (360KB-2.88MB) 2x serial ports (16C550 Fast UART Compatible) 1x parallel port (SPP/EPP/ECP) PS/2 Keyboard PS/2 Mouse 4x Standard USB with USB Connector Set 1 IrDA connector for SIR Joystick/MIDI, Line Out, Line In & Microphone In Connectors for built in AC'97 Hardware v2.1 CODEC using Analog Device's (AD1881) 3D sound output
Expansion slot	5 x PCI 32-bit slots, PCI 2.2 compliant (one PCI/ISA shared) 1 x AMR slot (Audio Modem Riser) 1 x ISA 16-bit slots 1x AGP (1x & 2x Mode, 66/133MHz) slot (3.3v device support)
Power Management	Power On by Power Switch Supports WOL(Wake On LAN) / WOR (Wake On Ring) Power Off by Windows^®95/98 Shut down & Power Switch ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) feature Supports OS Direct Power Management (OSPM)
Form Factor	ATX Form Factor : 30.5cm(L) x 21.3cm(W) Fits into regular ATX Case (9 mounting holes) ATX Connector on Board
BIOS	2 Mbit (256KB) FLASH EEPROM AMI AGP BIOS with Enhanced ACPI, DMI, Green, PnP support JumperFree Design to Adjust CPU/DIMM Bus Frequency LS120, ZIP, ATAPI CD-ROM, LAN, IDE #1, #2, #3, #4 bootable

Test Configuration
Processor(s):	AMD K7-700
RAM:	1 x 128MB Mitsubishi PC100 SDRAM DIMM
Hard Drive(s):	IBM Deskstar 22GXP DJNA-370910
Video Card(s):	3dfx Voodoo3 2000 16MB ATI Expression 2000 32MB
Bus Master Drivers:	AMD Bus Master Drivers 1.22 (MS-6167 & P7-F200A) VIA Bus Master Driver 2.1.43 (K7M)
Video Drivers:	3dfx Voodoo3 drivers 1.02.13 ATI Rage 128 drivers (4.11.4116)
DirectX version:	v.6.1a Win98
Operating System(s):	Windows 98 Second Edition (build 4.10.2222A)

Overall Rating (Out of a maximum of 5 Star)
Installation	***½
Performance	*****
Price	*******
Overclockability	****½
Material Quality	********
Stability	********
Overall Rating	********

Introduction

The Good

The Test

Conclusion