Written By:
Date Posted: April 1, 2002

shouldn't need any introduction. Long known for their quality products, in most likelihood, at one time, your PC was probably powered by Asus. In terms of motherboards, they've always been among the fastest available, and are well regarded for their stability.

The A7V266-E is the upgrade to their excellent A7V266. There were not many changes from the A7V266 we looked at awhile back, but there are a couple worth noting. They have added RAID, courtesy of the Promise "Lite", and more notably, the VIA KT266A chipset. The KT266A is the update to the much maligned KT266, and is widely regarded, until the KT333 was released last month, as the AMD chipset to have. Considering the marginal improvements in the KT333, there isn't any shame in owning the KT266A with this current crop of AMD CPUs.

Specifications

Supports Socket A Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron processors @ 200/266MHz Front-Side-Bus (FSB)
VIA KT266A VT8366 North Bridge chipset with VT8233 South Bridge
3 DIMM slots support up to 3GB PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM
Ultra-DMA 33/66/100
AGP Pro slot with AGP4X support
Up to six USB Ports, five PCI slots, one AMR shared slot, two serial ports, one parallel port
Optional C-Media CMI8738 6-Channel audio controller
Optional Promise RAID controller
Wake-On-LAN, Wake-On-Ring, Chassis Intrusion support
Smart Card Reader (SCR) interface support
ASUS PC Health Monitoring" and ASUS PC Probe" software

The Bundle

Trend Micro" PC-cillin 2000 Retail anti-virus program
ASUS PC Health Monitoring and ASUS PC Probe
Cyberlink® PowerPlayer SE", Video Live Mail" Retail

Next Page - The KT266A