ASUS A7A266 Fastest Chip supported?

[KiltedFool]

Greetings:
I'm getting the itch to do an upgrade, and had been considering my Hercules GeForce DDR-DVI up to a Ti200, but running a 900 Duron (200 FSB) in my Asus board will apparently be a noticable bottleneck. All of the documentation I can access from work says that the board can support 1 GHz+ processors. THe question is this: Exactly how high speed a processor can this board support? Just getting into a true 266 FSB processor will help some, anyone know? Would be nice to be able to get to an XP processor without having to buy a new mobo too, money is tight right now. At least I've got DDR crucial PC2100 in the board so I'm not too obsolete. No interest in overclocking, I want stability.

Oh, bought the board as a bundle back in about July, if I do swap the chip this will be my first processor work inside my box. Though I could likely get a quieter fan in the process.

Enough rambling I guess.
KF

 

[jcmkk]

I'm pretty sure that the A7A266 can run the Athlon XPs. You will probably have to update the bios, but other than that, I don't see why not. You may wanna check out some peoples rig profiles and see if you see anyone running a XP with your mobo.

 

[JimMc]

THIS indicates the A7A266's will support XP's if your board is version 1.1 with the correct BIOS.

 

[AndyHui]

If you have a PCB revision earlier than 1.10, you cannot support Athlon XP processors.

 

[KiltedFool]

Ok then, I assume I crack the case and look for a revision number on the board itself.

When I started up tonight I think my BIOS version was 1002, for totally worthless data.

Anyway, I'll check it when I'm not a walking zombie, thanks.

KF

 

[AndyHui]

If you had BIOS version 1002, most likely you have PCB rev 1.03 of the A7A266.

 

[KiltedFool]

Andy I'm beginning to see why they pay you the big bucks, you were dead on. Cracked 'er open and the Rec 1.03 was staring me in the face. So my board tops out in the Thunderbirds I guess, which isn't much of an upgrade other than going from 200 to 266 FSB, which will help some. Of course I'd finally break my "hasn't installed a CPU and HSF" cherry..

*sigh* Now to figure out an upgrade path that'll cheaply increase my performance and keep me from sleeping on the couch.

I'd love to get up to an XP and get it bundled with an Epox 8KHA+ or an ASUS, but the cost would put me in deep doo doo. ECS boards are cheap but tend to have a lot of problems.

Any thoughts on a fairly vanilla mobo combo that comes cheap with an XP in a bundle? don't need onboard lan, sound, RAID, any of that.

Thanks,
KF

 

[DKNG]

Your board will work with the AthlonXP. I have seen alot of people run an XP on revision 1.03 as long as you flash your bios to 1007 and you'll be fine.

 

[AndyHui]

Athlon XPs are not guaranteed to work with rev 1.03 of the board.

For each PCB rev, there is also what is known as PCBA revs. Other minor changes are included in these. Those people who managed to run an Athlon XP are lucky enough to get a late PCBA rev under PCB 1.03 with BIOS 1007.

I don't have enough data on A7A266 PCBA revs to tell you which one will work. ASUS also does not like me telling people about PCBAs....

 

[DKNG]

If your go to the Amdmb forum and go into the asus motherboard section you will see that many of the members are running AthlonXp's on their rev 1.03. Also bios Bios 1010 should enable the SSE intructions on on the revisions before 1.10.