Installation and Test Setup
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Installation was seamless and the most stress free ever. As a matter of fact, this was the easiest installation ever. I had to double check my installation, because I was sure I was forgetting something. Most of my headaches and hair loss came from the earlier installation of the K7M and the K7V. Attaching the components were simple. The only cause of concern is adequate cooling for the processor. Also, due caution must be taken when attaching the heatsink to the Duron and or Thunderbird. It does require a little patience when attaching the heatsink to the processor. Depending on the Cooler (Apha), it is a very tight fit and does require a certain amount of pressure to get the clip to fit on the Socket-A base. For benchmarking purposes, I decided to format the hard drives and start from scratch. Again, installation was so smooth, that it really wasn’t necessary. At the time, there were no Promise UltraDMA/100 drivers included with the Support CD. Before I has a chance to panic, Asus had sent it via email. After installing the UltraDMA/100 driver I was up and running. Unfortunately, due to the lack of availability on UltraDMA/100 hard drives and the fact the our test machine has two Seagate X15 15000RPM hard drives, I didn’t think you’d mind?The equipment used to perform this review is:
| Motherboard: | Asus K7M/K7V/A7V |
| Processor: | AMD 800/900/1000/1000 Thunderbird (Copper Interconnects) |
| Memory | 256MB Enhanced HSDRAM/256MB NEC Vchannel |
| Video Card: | Hercules Prophet II GTS 64MB |
| Video Driver: | Nvidia 5.13 (Native 4X Support and Compressed Textures in Quake 3) |
| Hard Drive: | Seagate Cheetah X15 |
| Adapter: | Adaptec 29160 |
The applications used to perform (benchmark), this review are:
- ZD WinBench99 CPUMark99
- ZD WinBench99 FPUMark99
- Content Creation Winstone2000
- Quake III TimeDemo 01 (Maximum Quality)
- 3dMark2000 PRO
- 3DMark99 Max
Let’s begin:
