Written By:
Date Posted: April 1, 2002

Stock cooling consists of a fan and heatsink combo on the Northbridge. Nothing much to say. It does the job, and doesn't make much noise.

As per KT266A specifications, the Southbridge is the VT8233 chip. This controls all the I/O functions of the chipset. Keep in mind that this revision only supports ATA100. I've always considered ATA133 kind of a marketing ploy, so I'm not going to lose any sleep over the lack of ATA133 support.

One annoying feature of the A7V266-E is the placement of the floppy connection. Why it needed to be placed in the lower half of the motherboard, next to IDE4 and IDE5 is beyond me. Anyone with a tall case, where the floppy bay is at the top, is going to have fits getting the cable to reach. Asus includes a fairly long floppy cable, so unless your tower is unusually tall, you should be fine.

Also pictured above are the additional USB connections. Sorry, no USB 2.0 here, but if you have a lot of USB devices, you'll be happy with this board. A daughtercard (not pictured) for additional USB ports is included.

One issue some people may have is the placement of the DIMM slots. Because the Socket-A interface is turned 90 degrees, with the clips facing the slots, this might cause problems for people using oversized heatsinks.

Luckily, our Swiftech MCX462, a monster of a heatsink, didn't interfere with our DIMM slots. Larger heatsinks that employ the clipping mechanism may run into problems though.

Whenever I see integrated audio, I cringe. Instead of the craptacular AC'97 audio, we have the much better C-Media chip. It's similar to that of the Hercules XP, which is a great sound card. Personally, I still prefer my Audigy, but to be honest, the onboard audio is good enough that for general purpose use, those without sound cards could avoid purchasing one.

Finally, the I/O connections...

Again, every standard feature is included here, including the sound connection and game port. LAN support wasn't included, so don't throw your current network card out.

Whew, with that out of the way, let's check out the BIOS.

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