ECS K7VZM KT133 Motherboard

The K7VZM uses an Award BIOS with 4MB Flash ROM. The features offered in the Bios weren’t anything new; nevertheless it included most features boards offer today. If you’re a new user having few experiences in installation of motherboards, the help menu of the Bios is quite adequate to give you some understanding of a particular function. It would have been nice to see it giving recommendations for different settings as well, yet we cannot expect too much from a little board now can we. Besides these aren’t real big issues either, what really matters is how well the board performs.

The “Frequency/Voltage Control” menu allows you to set the FSB setting for the board depending on your processor. The FSB ranges from 90MHz to 200MHz. This is quite an extensive range, so if you plan on some overclocking it leaves a fair range to play with. The only problem however is that the board does not allow shifting the processor’s core voltage which can limit your overclocking options. However the fact remains, these boards are not specifically intended for a hardcore overclocker and rather for an average user. Therefore extreme overclocking is not an option, which should be considered with such a board.

The Bios also allows us to set the frequency of the memory bus to be set to a value 33MHz higher/lower than that of the FSB, which can be set through the “Chipset Features Setup” menu. The board also supports hardware monitoring of CPU Temperature, System Temperature, Voltages and RMP speed of Fans. (CPU Fan and Power Fan). It also includes a safety feature of shutting down the system if it reaches a certain temperature. These features aren’t anything new to us, yet I considered it’s best said rather than not.