Our Verdict

In terms of support Elite have a good technical team in place, which was able to deal with our queries quickly and efficiently. We can't the same for their Web Site, which requires a total revamp! Having eventually selected the English language as requested, we were eventually connected to the site at our seventh attempt, only to find how slow it was, and suffered clearly from the lack of investment Elite has made in this area. Get it sorted Elite!

Well what about the motherboard? first off we were a tad concerned about it's stability, as having upgraded the BIOS the motherboard displayed signs of being very sick, slipping and sliding all over the place, particular concern was the random re-boots. The problems were rectified once the BIOS upgrade was carried out again, and as if by magic all the problems disappeared. Secondly the board has no ISA Slots so be sure you don't need to use ISA, as they are none! Thirdly, it has NO overclocking ability, so be sure you do not require this functionality. Lastly, as mention earlier no Vcore adjustment, slightly worrying if a processor requires slight adjustment to work correctly.

On the plus side, the performance is really no bad at all, and is clearly a middle of the road performer. The board does have an independent memory bus, and the ability to assign IRQ's manually; best of all there is enough space to insert a large heatsink.

The Elite K7VZM pricing is stunning, at a street price of under £60.00 plus VAT, it is well worth the purchase for consumers who require a short terms solution to climb onto the AMD Athlon or Duron processor ladder. Bearing in mind there is a new chipset offering only round the corner, and as tradition dictates one must wait for the chipset to settle before purchasing, you are looking to wait until first quarter 2001, so this could be a short terms solution for an ideal upgrade an will answer your immediate upgrade prayers. The only thing to bear in mind are the shortcomings we have already mentioned, this is not a product for overclockers or the tweakers amongst us, but just a straight forward motherboard which will work with the current crop of AMD processors.

We would have awarded the Elite our value award, but due to the little niggling problems we had, our position regarding awards was some what compromised. All in all, a great value for money motherboard, and one which deserves praise for Elite, as no major short cuts have been made to achieve such a stunning price.

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