Benchmark Results
CPU Arithmetic
FastFastfame Asus A7V
Fastfame - Dhry: 2749 Whet: 1368
Asus A7V - Dhry: 2758 Whet: 1368
A difference of 9 with Dhrystones, which is so small so as to be insignificant. Whetstone results are the same, which is to be expected with the same CPU.
CPU Multimedia
FastFastfame Asus A7V
Fastfame - Integer: 5456 Floating Point: 5800
Asus A7V - Integer: 5504 Floating Point: 5924
The A7V takes it out again, by a very very small margin. Nothing but a synthetic benchmark like Sandra would notice that difference.
Disk Subsystem
FastFastfame Asus A7V
Fastfame - 17645
Asus A7V - 25809
Now this I wasn't expecting. To make the test fair I used the integrated Promise IDE Controller on the Asus A7V to run both drives at ATA100 (the A7V's Integrated IDE is only ATA66). Avg CPU Usage during the disk benchmark was around 8% on both motherboards (recorded with XP Performance Logs). Both drives underwent the same procedure of formatting and defragmentation before testing. The Fastfame score is below what it should be according to Sandra, and my 4 year old A7V even beats it. I can only assume that the Fastfame has some issues that are beyond my understanding.
Memory
FastFastfame Asus A7V
Fastfame - Int Buffered: 1005 Float Buffered:982
Asus A7v - Int Buffered: 978 Float Buffered:978
Now quite what I was expecting. The A7V's slightly higher FSB should give it an advantage, but it didn't. I guess the KT133A has better memory management than the KT133. As it should.
3D Mark 2001SE
The difference between motherboards was a massive 10 points. This is hardly surprising, as 3DMark2001SE pushes my poor Geforce2MX about as far as it can go.
Overall, there isn't a whole lot of difference between the two boards. This is to be expected however, as the KT133A was basically a bug fixed version of the KT133 with proper support for 133Mhz FSB. The disk test results are confusing, as I expected the Fastfame to perform better. Perhaps a BIOS revision will help this. But I don't see Fastfame releasing another BIOS for such an old chipset.
Conclusion
As I said before this isn't the motherboard that an avid overclocker or performance freak will be buying. If, however, you are after a machine for some web browsing or word processing, a KT133A with a Duron and some SDRAM is a very cost-effective combination. I personally use this motherboard as the base of my home server, which is a Windows 2000 Server machine servicing my network. If you, like me are still using a KT133 board like the Asus A7V as your primary machine, then it is most definitely NOT worth upgrading to a KT133A solution.
The layout of this board could have been a lot better, the power connector, large number of capacitors around the socket and the AGP retention clip that gets stuck on the DIMM clip are all annoyances. The board performs as it should in all benchmarks except the Sandra Disk test, which was lower than it should be. The manual is well written for a change, which came as a pleasant surprise.
I want to recommend this board, but the problems I mentioned above are quite annoying and there are other boards out there that don't suffer from these annoyances. If the layout had been better I would like this board a lot, as it is I think it's OK.