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Date Posted: October 11, 2001
. A good "big brand" name, with a good reputation for stability, ease of use, and impressive benchmarks. Asus have been major players when it comes to Motherboards for quite a while now, and have made a good reputation and name for themselves amongst all users. DDR. Another word that is doing the rounds lately. Put the two together and you have the A7V266 Main Board.
The Asus A7v266 Motherboard is an AMD Socket A Motherboard for use with Athlon and Duron processors, as well as provision for the Palomino Athlons too. The board supports 100 and 133 FSB (200 and 266) and for overclocking you can increase the FSB in 1mhz frequencies. The board is based on the KT266 platform with the VT8366 Northbridge.
Specifications
CPU: Supports AMD Athlon/Duron up to 1.4 ghz + on the socket A Format
Chipset: VIA KT266 VT8366 Northbridge with VT8233 Southbridge
Memory: 3 DIMM slots supporting upto 3GB of PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM
Multi I/O: Ultra-DMA 33/66/100, AGP Pro slot with AGP 4x Support, Six USB ports (4 included) Five PCI slots, 1 AMR Shared, 2 Serial and one Parallel.
Sound: C-MediaCMI8738 6 Channel Audio Controller
BIOS: 2Mb AwardŽ BIOS, PnP, ACPI, TrendŽ ChipAway Virus (TCAV), Green, Boot Block, BIOS
The general layout of the board at first glance looks good, however, after installing the board and putting the entire system together I did find a few annoying problems. The main one is the position of the AUX input for the onboard sound. Asus for some strange reason placed it just at the front of PCI slot number 4, which if all your cards don't have a cut out or indentation at that point (read: none of mine do), once you have connected the AUX to the output of your CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive, it effectively renders that slot useless, as there is NO room left to put a card in without crushing the AUX slot connector. A real shame that.
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