| Product: |
Asus ALi Chipset A7A266 |
| Date: |
14/01/02 (536 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: dual memory support, takes new Amd XP processors, fast as lightning an overclockers dream
Disadvantages: not for the faint hearted, needs best power supply you can get, not for the midi case
Excited I nearly tore the box to pieces trying to get at my lovley shiney new asus motherboard. Being an Abit fan id heard good things about Asus so wishing to upgrade to ddr memory and an Athlon xp processor I decided Id give Asus a chance. First thing youll notice about this board is its a tad larger than other boards so if you have a midi tower case be carefull inserting any cd rom drives as thier are some capacitors that are very close to where your drive will eventually sit. And thiers a great danger here of knocking one clean of if your a ham fisted kind of person.
This is in theory a great board as this board will let you use your old pc133 memory till you can afford some ddr memory.
Taking memory into account Be carefull with your choice and buy if you can onlly crucial as this memory flys in this board. It does not like the cheap stuff and if you opt for unbranded memory you can be sure your gonna get system lock ups.
My board dosnt have sound on board so positioning of the sound card is crucial. If your card is Creatives Sblive this card must be inserted in slot 3 this is because slot 3 does not share any irqs. Also you have to dig into the bios and force slot 3 to have irq 5 anything else again your gonna have problemos.
Asus also make what they call an I-Panel this they say will work with this board. (NOT) I bought the I-Panel for the A7A266 It is lovley. The I-Panel is a device that plugs into the board via 2 or 3 ribon cables it will monitor your system teperature, cpu fans and all crucial componets including cpu temps. This Panel sits in a spare 5and a quarter drive bay and looks great. But allas it does not work great. The panel refreshes every 5 seconds or so and and as it does this it stalls the cpu. Its very prominent while playing music or games on normal applications the mouse pointer dissapears of the screen. And can result in lost time trying to find the pointer again graphics work is impossible when this happens. A mod by
a third party is available for this but onlly reduces the problem by abou 50%. My advice with this one is leave well alone and give the I-Panel a miss . Asus are aware of this problem and they say they are working to correct it asap. Well mine is a nice and expensive paperweight.
Also a MUST for this board is a quality power supply 300 watts minnimum I must stress You should buy a 400 watt one.
If you are new to building your own system I advise stay away from this board. Dont get me wrong in a pair of experianced hands it will fly. But it can be far to problematical for a first time buyer. If you do go for this board check and make sure its a rev 1.10 as boards under this rev are reported to not like the new Athlon XP cpu.
Sorry if Ive put anyone of this board It is not my intention but I do feel that the whole story needs to be put forward to the novice or they could be in for a lot of heart ache and head aches. If you do know what your doing hey good luck.
Here are a few usefull web site forums you may want to check out for further information :
www.overclockers.co.uk\forums
www.amd.com\forums\asus
also please dont hesitate to email me with any probs. All in all a very capable board overclocks nicley. But remember I recomend a full tower case.
Summary:
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Last comment:
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Daisybelle - 14/01/02 Some useful info - I have one of these under my hood, and wasn't aware of the Athlon XP problems, so thanks very much, will bear this in mind when upgrade time comes around. |
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