Computer Assembly

Mainboard and Chipset

Asus K7M

Purchase date:

22 Dec 1999

Price:

$148

The Asus K7M mainboard is based on AMD AMD-750 chipset, which comprises the AMD-751 System Controller AMD-756 Peripheral Bus Controller.

The AMD-750 chipset supports a 200MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) and three PC-133 SDRAM DIMMs, and complies with Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) 1x and 2x 2.0 specifications and the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) 2.2 bus interface specification. The latter specification supports six PCI bus masters, though the K7M features five 32-bit PCI slots, one AGP slot, one ISA slot, and one audio modem riser.

The chipset that controls the system and peripherals busses is known as the North Bridge chipset.

The K7M also comprises the VIA VT82C686A Apollo Pro PCIset. This chipset features a PCI input/output integrated peripheral controller that supports UltraDMA/66 and allows burst mode data transfer rates of up to 66.6MB per second from hard drive to system memory.

The chipset that controls the UltraDMA bus is known as the South Bridge chipset.

Above: the VIA VT82C686A Apollo Pro PCIset chipset, with adjacent Electronically Erasable Progammable Read Only Memory (EEPROM) Basic Input Output System (BIOS) chip and 3V Li battery.

The K7M comes with an AMI BIOS, which is a bit of a change for me. I am used to the mature and useful Award BIOS. After experimenting with the AMI BIOS for a few hours I have grown accustomed to it.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this wonderful motherboard is its three, count em, three 3-pin power connectors for fans!

Above: Some of the components of the K7M mainboard, with system RAM installed.

Above: Here we see the colored parallel, keyboard, and PS/2 connectors required by the PC99 specification.

Now and then Asus posts BIOS updates on its web site, and posts beta BIOS updates on its FTP server in Germany. To update my mainboard's BIOS, I create a DOS boot disk (in Win 9x, open a DOS window and type format /s a:) and copy to it the BIOS update file (a file called, for example, km126.rom) and the k7_flash.exe utility. Then I boot to DOS and run the k7_flash.exe utility, and enter the name of the BIOS update file (such as km126.rom, which is the name of the Asus beta BIOS update released in late January). See the link to Asus K7M BIOS Updates, above.