A very solid Athlon XP board (Asus A7V266-E)

Member Name: Bezuk

Product:	Asus A7V266-E
Date:	15/08/02 (5338 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Generally good, sensible layout. Built in support for most current standards e.g ATA/100, Plenty of room for expansion, Very stable, Almost all the BIOS options you?ll ever need, Frequently updated BIOS ? well supported by Asus, Great performance, very close to that of the KT333

Disadvantages: Cheap, annoying whiny Northbridge fan, Possibly too little space for some huge CPU coolers, A couple of semi-useful BIOS options omitted, No reading from thermal diode, and dubious temperature monitoring

It may not exactly be the newest chipset on the block, but VIA's KT266A was one of the company's most successful products. Coinciding nicely with the release of the Athlon XP processor, and generally outperforming, or at least equalling the performance of the competing nVidia nForce chipset, at a much lower cost, the KT266A made up for the disappointing KT266 chipset released only months earlier.

While it has since been surpassed by VIA's own KT333, and current or upcoming DDR-333 solutions from SiS and nVidia, the performance gained by moving over to one of these systems using a current Athlon XP processor is negligible. This is why KT266A powered motherboards remain a very viable purchasing option even today. And what better example than the Asus A7V266-E, which is what I'm looking at today.

Asus have been making motherboards for ages now, and most people will agree that they've gotten pretty good at it. Asus boards have a well-deserved reputation for being solid and stable, with plenty of 'enthusiast' options and a decent selection of special features, with top of the line performance to boot. So, it was no great surprise that Asus made a KT266A board.

On to board specifics. The CPU socket is, naturally, located toward the top left, and is the normal AMD Socket-A (462-pin) type, which AMD have been using since the release of the first socket-based Athlons (unlike a certain other company I could name who insist on changing their CPU interface every five minutes). This means that you can equip any Athlon in here, although an Athlon XP would be highly recommended. Asus have left a fair amount of space around the socket for the installation of meaty coolers, although it's a little close perhaps down the left side of the socket.

Alongside the CPU socket are three 184-pin DDR DIMM slots. No, you can't put a standard 168-pin SDRAM DIMM in one of these slots, it simply won't fit, so if you'r
e looking to upgrade from an older system gradually, you'll have to upgrade at least the memory at the same time as the motherboard. Conveniently, the release catches on the lower side of each DDR slot doesn't interfere with the AGP slot when released, meaning you can mess with the memory without having to take out your AGP card.

In the normal place on the right-hand edge of the board are the two standard IDE connectors. These channels are powered by the motherboard's Southbridge, a VIA VT8233, which allows for transfer modes up to UDMA 5 (ATA/100). Don't worry if you have an ATA/133 hard disk however, as the extra performance is negligible from ATA/66 to ATA/100, let alone from 100 to 133. If you have the RAID version of the board, two more IDE connectors will have been provided, this time connected to a separate chip, most likely a Promise one, which will allow you to create a RAID array using drives connected to this controller. However, the board I am reviewing is not the RAID model.

Back to the left, there's the AGP slot and five PCI slots. As with standard Asus tradition, the AGP is of the rare AGP Pro variety, although I very much doubt people buying this board will be installing one of the workstation-class graphics cards that requires this special connector. Still, you can't blame Asus for trying. As previously stated, the expansion capabilities of the board consist of five PCI slots, which should be plenty for pretty much everyone. I moved my three PCI cards around each the slots without encountering any resource conflicts. There's also a useless ACR (Advanced Communications Riser) slot at the bottom of the board, although I challenge anyone to find a use for this.

The rest of the layout stuff is also pretty standard fare. There is an integrated audio version of the board available, and if you have this version the chip will be present on the board. Oddly enough, the floppy drive connector is in the mi
ddle of nowhere, smack underneath the CMOS power cell. While I don't use the floppy connector, those of you with overly large cases or unusual configurations might have to invest in an extra-long cable to make the trip.

On the back panel there's the standard PS/2 connectors for mouse and keyboard, two 9-pin serial connectors, a parallel connector and two USB ports (1.1 only of course). Two more USB ports can be added via an add-on plate that can be installed in one of the PCI card brackets. Asus are kind enough to supply this add-on with the motherboard. If you have the audio version then all the associated ports will appear on the back panel also.

Once you've got it set up, a look around the BIOS is in order. The BIOS setup provides a great many tweaking instruments - you can configure the processor speed both by modifying the multiplier, if your CPU is multiplier-unlocked, and by changing the FSB speed in 1 MHz increments. The corresponding speed of the PCI bus is listed by each FSB speed. You can modify the CPU core voltage, but not the I/O voltage. You can also set the memory clock independently of the FSB speed. A possible omission is the lack of ability to change the PCI to FSB or AGP to FSB ratios, a useful tool when overclocking a system without taxing peripheral components.

The memory timings and all AGP settings are fully customisable. Using this board I was easily able to run my CAS 2.5-3-3 rated memory at CAS 2-2-2 speeds (although it makes very little difference with DDR memory). Whether this is an artefact of good design and timings on the part of VIA and Asus or a testament to the quality of the Crucial memory used remains to be seen. It is most likely a combination of the two.

If you're not into all this BIOS setup stuff, then the board sets pretty much everything up for you. The only thing you have to tell it when installing a CPU for the first time is the clock speed of the CPU you have given it,
from a choice of two options. The board checks the multiplier of the chip, and comes up with two possible speeds based on Front Side Bus (FSB) speeds of 100 MHz and 133 MHz respectively. Your selecting the correct value tells the board at what speed the FSB will run.

Stability wise, the board is truly first class. I've never had a piece of hardware fail to work in this board. The only compatibility problem I have ever encountered with this board was the nVidia/VIA compatibility problem, this time encountered with a GeForce 2 GTS graphics card. For those of you unfamiliar with this bug, it results in highly unstable 3D performance with 'infinite loop' bluescreens. If you can't fix it by upgrading your VIA service pack and nVidia Detonator driver, then the sure-fire fix is to lower the AGP data rate to 2x. This results in no lost performance whatsoever and in my case certainly fixed the bug. However when I upgraded the graphics card to a GeForce 3 Ti 500 a couple of months later the bug was gone, even in AGP 4x.
In terms of software support you get a CD with the Asus Probe software on it, used for reading fan speeds and temperatures, an (outdated) version of the VIA 4-in-1 service pack and a version of the AFLASH utility used to flash the BIOS. Upgrades to the BIOS are very frequent from Asus and fix several problems, so I highly recommend you upgrade from ftp.asuscom.de ASAP.

In terms of down points, there are some harsh ones. Possibly the most annoying thing about it is the fact that instead of a simple, decently sized passive heatsink on the Northbridge chip, Asus opted to put a whiny little 40mm fan on instead. I've had untold trouble with this fan, first with it grinding away, and more recently with it failing to spin unless prompted. And to make it worse it's a non-standard design, making it hard to replace with a new 40mm fan. Asus have clearly learned their lesson here, as the newer A7V333 boards are equipped with
a heatsink alone.

Further, the A7V266-E can't read from the thermal diode featured on Athlon XP chips, and it doesn't have support for an external thermal probe, which raises the question as to exactly how it is reading CPU temperature. I would guess that there's a motherboard-mounted sensor on the CPU socket, but there's no telling how accurate it is. The odd positioning of the floppy drive connector might also count as a drawback. And being an older board it doesn't have some of the newer connectivity options that some might consider normal, such as USB 2.0 support, Firewire, or ATA/133 support.

It should also be noted that the CPU multipliers in the BIOS revision I use (version 1009) only reach 13.0x. This means that the board is good to run current Athlon XP 2100+ CPUs, which use the 13.0x multiplier, but a further BIOS upgrade will be required to support newer CPUs. A BIOS upgrade will also most likely be required in order for this system to support AMD's new 'Thoroughbred' 0.13 micron Athlon XP chips. It remains to be seen whether Asus are forthcoming with this BIOS upgrade.

All in all the Asus A7V266-E is an outstanding motherboard based on a proven chipset, and delivers great performance for much less money than a KT333 based board. How can you argue with that?

Summary: