More Good, Bad, and Test
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Stability wise, the Asus K7V-RM was one of the first boards approved by AMD to be the carriers of the Athlon 1 GHz CPU. AMD even uses the K7V-RM in their evaluation boards that send to reviewers and prospective customers. Such a recommendation should not be overlooked, since AMD would only pick the top motherboards to show off their technology. In house tests, like Q3 Demos running for 48 hours and intense system loads, have simply never failed on this board. Even the K7M crashed a couple times, but the K7V-RM seems to be incredibly solid.There is only one major downfall to this motherboard, as far as I can tell, that will affect most consumers. That is the lack of room for expansion. With only 3 PCI slots, don’t expect to be living on this motherboard for your primary PC, unless all need is a graphics card and network card. If you are building a second system and are trying to keep the cost down, the K7V-RM is a great motherboard for you. If you want to build a high end expandable gaming or development machine, get its big brother, the K7V
| CPU | AMD Athlon 750 |
| Memory | 128 MB Mushkin 222 PC133 |
| Hard Drive | 20.5 GB Western Digital ATA/66 7200 RPM |
| Video Card | Asus GeForce v6800 DDR |
| Video Drivers | Detonator 5.13 Drivers |
| Operating System | Windows 98 SE |
| Revision | 1.03 |
| Content Creation Winstone 2000 | |
| Athlon 750 on K7V-RM | 30.3 |
| Athlon 750 on SL-77KV | 30.1 |
| AMD Athlon 750 on Epox EP-7KXA | 30.1 |
As expected, the Asus K7V-RM is slighly faster than the competition, though not by any staggering amount that I would recommend upgrading from another KX133 solution. From all the testing, I can say that most manufacturers are sticking close to the design specs of the VIA’s KX133 reference, so the performances will be close to the same. It is the extra features like overclocking that will claim the winner.
The final verdict comes down to whether or not you need the extra PCI slots that the standard ATX form K7V will provide. Most readers who are interested in getting the most out of their system should probably look towards other motherboard solutions. Don’t let this analysis fool you, this board is most stable and fastest we have tested so far. But in this case, size does matter to PC enthusiasts. You may want to wait for our review of the K7V-RM’s counterpart the K7V, which you should expect in the near future.
