Sleek and sexy, oh, oh, baby! (SoA VIA KT266A ATX R)

Member Name: tigertom22

Product:	SoA VIA KT266A ATX R
Date:	27/02/02 (408 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 266 FSB, 4 x IDE's, Athlon

Disadvantages: Won't make tea

Ah... though this isn’t just another motherboard. This is the motherboard I “want” to buy, this is the best low price motherboard available, it will let you use the most up to date RAM and some of the fastest chips around. It’s a sexy motherboard.

For anyone that doesn’t know what a motherboard is. It’s a big set of circuits and chip and it’s the backbone of your computer. Nothing works without it, everything uses it and it is the “Motherboard” of your computer. You will have some other “boards” in your computer, normally called cards. But this is the “mother” we are talking about.

What does the motherboard do? What doesn’t it do?
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Your motherboard will control and allow: Your chip to receive data, your chip to send out its answers, control and run your hard disks, control and run all your cards.
Basically when you plug things into the back of your motherboard, you’re plugging the cables directly into the motherboard.

So what’s this one like?
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Well in my humble opinion it’s one of the best. Because it’s from Abit (well known and respected company), it runs AMD chips only (so up yours Intel) and it has the (slobber, slobber) 266 FSB bus speed. Oh baby! (Bus speed is the speed in which your RAM and motherboard interact. The last FSB level was 133 and now we have 266, oh fast!) AND it can do RAID. (Explained later)

Specifications:
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Here are the all-important specifications and not the very boring ones no ones cares about!

Audio Output: None (This is good, Onboard Sound is normally crap and painful to disable, not having it in the first place forces you to buy a sound card. More expensive, but worth it)

Video Output: None. GOOD for the same reasons above, except we are now talking ab
out a graphics card.

Chipset Type VIA Apollo KT266A (I know the 266 means the bus speed can emulate 266Mhz the rest may mean something to someone, not me though)

Compatible Processors: (This bit is almost joyous to write) “Athlon XP” AND “Duron”. Which in boring computer lands means: The motherboard works with all “Athlon” chips (if it says Athlon it will work) it works with the new XP chips (Nought to do with windows) and it’s backwards compatible for the Duron chips (which are cheaper versions of the Athlons). What a range!

ATX: Well doh! (There are only two types of Motherboard types: the old AT type (computer didn’t turn its self off) and the new, funky, ATX (which does turn its self off)).

RAM (The interesting stuff): This motherboard will cope with up to 4Gigs of Ram (which is probably just enough to have windows running without it crashing from lack of resources LOL), which is loads. Most people at the moment should aim for 256MB or 512MB (unless you want to make music so get as much as you can).
The RAM is “DDR SDRAM” which is great. The “DDR” means it works in “double time”. (Don’t know enough about it to waffle about it, but I’m sure it works twice as fast as non-DDR). And the SDRAM means you don’t need two of them for the RAM to work. It is a stand alone RAM. (S = Single)

IDE / EIDE: This is the motherboard / hard drive interface protocol. This is what it should be.


Slots and ports:
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5 x PCI slots: These are used for sound cards, TV cards, internal modem cards. Basically these slots are for cards and 5 are enough for most. (I use 3)

1 x processor - Socket A slot: This is where your processor goes. (“Socket A” is just the type of socket it is) (So old Socket 7 chips won’t work with this motherboard).

1 x AGP: These are a great ide
a. This is your dedicated Graphics slot. (Accelerated Graphics Port) You only need one.

4 x Memory - DIMM 184-PIN: These are your memory slots, the RAM we mentioned earlier. You only need to make sure you buy 184 pin RAM and the supported types with in this case is ECC and NP. You’ve got 4 slots so you can jam in 4 x 256MB ones, or 3 512MB’s or...

2 x serial: The old type port. Used for old mouse’s and modems. USB is replacing these, but they are always handy to have.

1 x parallel port: Your printer/scanner port (Unless you have USB stuff)

2 x serial USB: For pretty much anything as long as it’s USB.

1 x mouse generic (PS/2 Style): The new dedicated mouse port (replaced the serial).

1 x keyboard generic (PS/2 Style): The new dedicated keyboard port (replaced the old weird one, don’t worry about it to much).

2 x storage DMA/ATA-133 (Ultra): These are for plugging your hard drives into the motherboard. 133 ATA is the fastest available at the moment. And this motherboard can do this speed! As long as your hard drives can though, and you use an ATA cable.

2 x storage DMA/ATA-133 (Ultra): Yep another two, these are for the RAID stuff. You cannot use ATAPI devices on these. (CD-ROMS etc..)

1 x storage floppy interface: Floppy drive port.

4 x serial USB: Yes more USB ports. These are kind of fake ones that plug into a special serial port and allow you to use another 4 USB devices. Nice!

Features:
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Standard cute stuff, not essential but makes the computer nicer: Hardware Monitoring CPU core temperature, CPU fan tachometer, chassis fan tachometer, system voltage, CPU core voltage, Manual settings: CPU frequency, processor core voltage, memory bus frequency. Sleep / Wake Up Keyboard wake up, wake on modem (WOM), RTC (real-time clock) wake up, suspend to RAM (STR), wake on LAN (WOL), mouse wake up, wake on USB port, wake on ri
ng (WOR).
All very dull and most people probably wont use them.

The BIOS: This features ACPI support, APM support, DMI support and the new legendary SoftMenu III. Which is a very nice bit of software that runs your BIOS and RAID stuff.

Max Bus Speed 266 MHz: Like I said before this is fast! But you need the PC2100 or 266FSB RAM to go with it, or it will just run at 133.

Plug and Play: Thank god! This allows easy installation of devices to your computer.

RAID: (That’s what the R in the title means!) Won’t go into to much detail here as I am not the best person to lecture on RAID and it’s dangerous stuff. Basically though you have the choice of 3 RAID levels: RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10: Backup, mirroring or quick access. And you will need 4 hard drives for this. Software is included to run this.
OR you can have the very useful feature of just having 4 IDE devices (mentioned in the ports and slots). Essentially you can plug into your motherboard 4 IDE devices and have them all running as master and none of them sharing a cable which means your computer will run as fast as possible.


What do you get in the box?
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You get a free:
2 x ATA IDE cable (for hard drives)
1 x floppy cable (go on guess)
1 x USB cable (for USB devices)
BIOS CD-ROM and floppy with other useful hardware monitoring software and the RAID software
A motherboard (few!)
A nice manual written by some foreign guy with a less than perfect understanding of English sentence construction. But you can just about read it (without cracking up laughing!)


Summary:
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All in all this is a nice motherboard that allows you to upgrade your computer to the top end of specifications or just keep it behind pace cheaply.
4 IDE’s is great, 266 FSB bus speed is fantastic, all “Athlon” chips is nice and very good for upgrading later
, 133 ATA hard drive access is nice again and there is enough ports and slots to please most people.

This motherboard was built for speed and upgrade-ability. I can honestly think of no downers to it. I’ve so far brought and installed 3 of them and use one myself. Top motherboard!

Costing £140-ish, which is more than the cheap ones out there, but definitely worth the money as this motherboard will be useful for some time to come (As opposed to a £100 ones).

The only problem with it is that you can’t get beer from it, if you could it would be perfect. Here’s dreaming!

Buy one!

Summary: