K7M Vs K7V ?? input

[Zeroumus[DH]]

Preparing to write an article , need some before hand opinions K7M Vs K7V

I am writting a small article, only to be used for my local Quake mod group. I am starting this article because I have the old K7M, and my buddy bought a K7V recently, and it sucks hard core. Anyway, I am getting his board tommorow all day to do some tests to see if I am full of Sh!t or not, surely this board is not that bad... Anyway, I just wanna know, what is the conscienses here, which board do you think is better? I just wanna know the opinions before I go into it, If you have any suggestions so I give each board a fair chance, I would like to know them too. Since I do not have access to a AGP 4x card up here, nobody has one in my circle of people, I will have to leave that part out, but will make it clear in the article that this aspect of the board was not explored

 

[Zeroumus[DH]]

the AGP thing

it would not matter to much since my audience is all 3dfx users

 

[Soccerman]

make sure that you tweak the memory settings to the max. those are important. AGP as well. tell us what you're results are. BTW, does the K7M have SuperBypass on it?

 

[Wizkid]

Well I have never used a K7M, but my K7V works awesome. Hasn't caused a single problem for me My video card is a voodoo3 2000 AGP, and I think a lot of problems are caused by cards that take more power. Also, the quality of the power supply makes a huge different. However, I don't really think there is much different between the two boards as far as stability is concerned as long as you have good RAM and a good power supply

 

[Zeroumus[DH]]

Nope I do not have access to the super bypass capable board, which is going to make the results a little less meaning full for anyone considering buying a new one..

Here is what happened though, and why I am doing this comparison, my neighbor has an athlon running at 150 Mhz more than mine, he went and bought the K7V, immediatly ditching his K7M, upon getting his new board up, he was not able to beat his old K7M with super bypass, nor my K7M without even with 150 Mhz more...

I find this all hard to believe, so I have decided to test these boards under controlled enviorments to attempt to get a little bit to the truth, the K7V should be able to beat my non-super bypass K7M, agreed?

oh, I have no doupt the board is up to snuff for stability, won't even be putting that to the test.

 

[Soccerman]

yeah the test won't be that good..

though you know, the Irongate in Anands tests with Superbypass did just as well as the VIA KX133 with 100mhz fsb, and memory at 133mhz.

However, drivers and BIOS's have changed, so things might be different now.

 

[corkyg]

The main advantage I can see in the K7V is a better choice of PCI slots and IRQ combos.

I am running two K7Ms both same except for vid cards. One is G400 and the other is V6800. In typical Asus fashion, once they had run for a few days they became rock solid. I have planned to replace them with K7Vs, but the more I run them I say "why?" If the K7V ran any better I would not be able to notice it.

Power supply is critical with the V6800 GeForce vid card. I replaced a 300W Powerman with a 300W Sparkle . . . and it became a solid citizen. Each has 384 MB of Mushkin PC-133 RAM,

Both run a full array of stuff . . . SCSI and USB. But . . . this may be key . . . almost no Microsoft ware except for Windows. Also I allow no background music from AV programs, etc. No Config files at all . . . pure Windows. Both also are on a LAN with a laptop through a hub.

Can't really ask for more. Both are overclocked to 800 MHz.