The Asus A7S333 is an SiS 745-based Socket A (462) motherboard for AMD Athlon, Athlon XP, and Duron processors. It supports AGP 4X, has five PCI slots, an optional AMR slot, three optional IEEE 1394 interfaces, six USB 1.1 connections, a smart card reader connection, iPanel connector, infrared header, and the usual suite of legacy I/O (including 100MHz UDMA EIDE.) It may also optionally be fitted with the C-Media CMI8738 six channel PCI audio device. The board supports 100MHz (PC1600), 133MHz (PC2100), and 166MHz (PC2700) DDR SDRAM.

In addition to all of this, the board has a nice handful of additional features which make it a pleasure to own. It features a user-loadable 16 color boot screen, and a utility built into BIOS from which new BIOS is loaded from a FAT12-formatted (MS-DOS standard) floppy disk, removing the need for a boot disk. It features "JumperFree" mode for easy overclocking, with bus frequency selectable to 1MHz resolution, and (With an Athlon XP installed) CPU overheat protection. It also supports ACPI and Concurrent PCI. It also includes a small block of dip switches to force system and memory bus speeds in hardware.

The A7S333 features three DIMM slots for DDR SDRAM, supporting modules up to 1GB. Only two DIMMs are supported at the 333MHz (166MHz DDR, PC2700) speed. PC2700 DDR SDRAM has a peak throughput of 2.7GB/s.

There are, however, some things missing here that you would expect to find on a DDR333 motherboard, like USB 2.0 for example, or 133MHz UDMA IDE. For an overclocker's system, automatic fan speed control would have been nice, but the thermal overload protection will do. I'm surprised that they didn't offer a board with onboard ethernet, as well. There is no retail package offered with additional USB connectors and/or the S/PDIF audio connector, which does thankfully come with coaxial or optical connections, or both.


   .-- Keyboard, mouse, USB1/2
  |
  v
+----------------------------------------+
|___| o                         o      o |
|__|                        ++++++       |
|_            +-----------+ |DIMM|       |
| -.          |   ___   4 | ||||||       |
|  |          |  |CPU|  6 | ||||||       |
|  |LPT/      |  |___|  2 | ||||||       |
|  |Serial    |           | ||||||       |
|  |          +===========+ ||||||   __  |
|_-'            o      o    ||||||  |88| |
|-_                         ||||||  |88| |
|  |Game/       +-----+     ||||||  |88| | <-- ATX power
|  |Audio       | SiS |     ||||||  |88| |
|  |            | 745 |     ||||||  |88| |
|_-' CD         +-----+     ||||||   ""  |
|  : :                      ||||||       |
|  : : Audio                ++++++       |
|AUX                           o         |
|           _____________AGP_            |
|  X        =================            |
|     _____________PCI1_                 |
|     ==================                 |
| +-+ _____________PCI2_   :::::IDE1:    |
| |*| ==================                 |
| +-+ _____________PCI3_   :::::IDE2:    |
|     ==================           __    |
| __  _____________PCI4_  :SMART: /  \   | <-- CMOS battery (CR2032)
||IO| ==================  ......  \__/   |
|`--' _____________PCI5_  :1394:  :::::: | <-- LEDs/Power/
| _   ==================                 |      Reset
| U  ___AMR_    USB:      USB:  :::::::  | <-- iPanel/IR
|o   =======                             |
+----------------------------------------+