But what about the board itself, you say? Well, there is not much to be shown to be honest. The A7V880 is the standard ASUS gold color, nothing fancy about it at all.

The first thing that stands out, however, is the fourth DIMM slot. There aren’t very many dual-channel socket-A boards that offer this many slots, and that allow for a maximum DIMM size of 1GB per slot. That’s a total of 4 gigabytes of RAM! ASUS recommends using the blue slots first, but I got better bandwidth using the black.

The socket itself is of the standard ASUS variety, including screw holes for those that need them. One of the things you may notice are the four blank spaces for MOSFETs. It looks like ASUS made provision for paralleling MOSFETs together for handling large currents, but found they did not need to do so. Although they are smaller than typical MOSFETs found on most boards, they are no less reliable than their larger counterpart. In typical ASUS fashion, they stripped the MOSFETs down to save both them and us some money, as is obvious by the price of the new entry. You can also see the isolation transformer next to the LAN connector. This helps to protect the board against high voltages appearing on the LAN connector.

The use of passive heatsink on the northbridge is a bit disappointing, but once again it’s cost effective. Unfortunately, so was their use of thermal paste. When I removed the heatsink from the northbridge, there were areas where it appeared there was poor contact between the heatsink and the northbridge itself. This is a situation easily remedied with a quick application. *NOTE: Do NOT use Artic Silver 5 on this northbridge! The gap in the middle on the face of the chipset itself is too high for this particular thermal paste, and you will end up using so much that it won’t be any better than standard white paste. I learnt this the hard way!

The space between the CPU socket and the northbridge is not very large, although there is about 3/4 of an inch, which should be enough for most users. Even my large Gigabyte heatpipe based heatsink had enough room, so unless you have a large heatsink, all should be ok.

The back I/O panel has 4 USB connectors, one serial port, one RJ45 LAN connector, a parallel port, standard PS2 mouse and keyboard connectors, and the added coaxial SPDIF connector, way above the standard audio ports. Unfortunately, the coaxial port only transfers stereo sound, or least that was all I could get it to do. I currently use analogue 5.1 speakers, so this was not much of an issue for me personally. It’s nice to have should I want to play music from my pc on my home stereo, but not much else.

Setup of the system was fairly simple. Being an “old hand” at socket-A, it took less than 15 minutes, including replacing the CMOS battery which I’ve had to do with about 26 of the last 30 I’ve built. I’m not sure why this is such a problem with ASUS boards, as I have not had the same problem with any other manufacturer’s boards, besides here and there.