AsusTek has produced many great motherboards in the last few years and the company's BX series was one of the most respected. It used software switching to adjust the processor speeds and its jumper-less design was excellent for processor upgrades. The latest A7V brings the series right up to date and supports AMD's latest Athlon and Duron processors.

This is AsusTek's first board to support a 266MHz front side bus, and it has the capacity to handle up to 1.5GB of PC-133 memory. One of the key features is the ability to smoothly alter the CPU frequency, increasing it in 1MHz steps, which is a joy for the over-clocking community. AsusTek has also included support for UltraDMA/ATA-100 data transfer and a 4x AGP slot. In common with most new boards, the company has done away with 16-bit slots, so you get five PCI slots and the obligatory AGP slot.

Using the VIA KT133 architecture with the VT82 C686A south bridge and VT8363 north bridge controllers, the board has support for all the latest features and includes an audio/modem riser extension board and the option of up to four USB ports. The board also incorporates 'PC Health Monitoring', which switches off your system if the processor starts to overheat. Considering how often even modern fans can fail, this is a valuable feature.

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On that note, you can connect several fans to this board, and if you're planning to install one of the fastest processors then a couple of extra fans should keep the temperature under control. This is definitely an interesting board for anyone who likes to push their processors a little bit further than the manufacturers intended.

For the full specification of this board, see the Features table.