Here's the obligatory shot of the CPU:

Nice isn't it. It was covered by thermal paste that matched the residue of thermal paste on my cooler, clearly demonstrating that the cooler and CPU were tested in unison on the board. I opted to place Artic Silver II between the CPU and Alpha heatsink for improved heat dissipation.

This shot shows just how much space the layout of A7V133 provides, so that overclockers can install just about and heatsink without worrying about space constraints, as well as the KT133a active cooler:

The onboard Promise IDE RAID ATA/100 controller:

And the fabled 686b southbridge chipset that was the source of data transfer errors on VIA motherboards until an official patch from VIA was released:

Once everything was mounted and attached, I pushed the Power button and watched the machine just sit there. Whoops, I forgot to plug in the power cable. Let's give it another shot ;) The machine roared to life and I quickly heard the deafening howl of the 7000 rpm Delta fan. Posts, great! 1530MHz even better! I booted into the bios, and noticed that the board arrived with the 11.5 multiplier and at 133MHz fsb speed which were the settings that Gen-X Tech had tested them. I then proceeded to watched the CPU temp escalate to 50C and level off. Boy this thing ran hot! Neil's 1466MHz Athlon runs just as hot, so I guess that I'm lucky to be able to squeeze 64 more MHz while still being at the same temp.

1530MHz is all fine and dandy, but I could not stop there. I really wanted to see just what this CPU could push. I skipped the slow methodical process of upping the fsb MHz by MHz. Instead, I just booted into the bios, switched the multiplier to 12 and restarted the system.

Post at 1598Mhz... Windows... Loading done... Yaaa!!! Move the mouse, and up pops a Blue Screen of Death... dang. Feeling frisky I spent a good half-hour upping the CPU voltage and even removing the jumper-free mode (which allows simple overclocking within the bios similar to Abit's Softmenu bios) to set the multipliers manually, all with no success to reach the 1600MHz speed.

I then proceeded to set the motherboard up into jumper-free mode once again and raised the fsb speeds to reach a max stable speed of 139MHz, for a CPU speed of 1575MHz.

On to the barrage of tests:

Next Page: Direct 3D Performance

Note: My Asus A7V133 seem to have a little bug reporting CPU speeds passed 1466 on the 133Mhz front side bus speed at post as it read the 1530Mhz setting (11.5x133) as 1466MHz. Once a non-standard fsb speed is used (such as 134Mhz for example) the correct speed was displayed on boot-up.