Opinions on Asus A7A266

[Tacoma99]

Seeking opinions on this board. Thanks.

 

[AndyHui]

It's a decent motherboard, but not spectacular in performance. Anandtech has a number of benchmarks which shows that unless you use a 266Mhz FSB AMD processor and PC2100 DDR SDRAM, performance will be not much better than the A7V133.

There is a new revision of the A7A266 (produced after April 17) that has the 5-10 block of dipswtiches for the multiplier. As long as you have BIOS version 1004 or later, you can take advantage of either the dipswitches or JumperFree mode.

If you are not lucky enough to have one of these new revision boards, there is a VERY SIMPLE mod that will allow you to make multiplier adjustments on the A7A266:

Picture of A7A266 wire mod
AMDMB Thread.

I have the older revision of the board without the multiplier dips, so I put this in the gf's computer. No problems at all, using SDRAM, and no messing around with 4-in-1s. Perfectly fine with the stuff from the ALi website.

For me, while it wasn't a spectacular experience like the CUSL2, it is definitely a decent board that I have no problems with. Even the onboard audio works (if a bit lacking in quality).

 

[Boonesmi]

im not real fond of boards that use the ali magic chipset, a7a266 is one of them

for ddr i much prefer the amd 760
for sdr the via kt133a

 

[Coligeon]

I'd personally not Buy anything with the Ali in it, loike Boonesmi said too. It isn'ta great motherboard, and nowhere near the top in performace. If you want DDR, look into the KT266 chip or the Amd760.

 

[bozo1]

I had the board for a few weeks. No problems whatsoever, quite stable. I sold it to a friend and got the Epox board for the overclocking features. The only downside is the Ali chipset memory performance isn't as good as the AMD but the difference is minimal. The board is also $20 or so more than the AMD or KT266 chipset flavors.