Where is the latest ALi Magik1 review? And A7A266 vs KA266?

[Noriaki]

Where is the latest ALi Magik1 review?

Friend of mine is wondering how it stacks up to the AMD760...we know it's worse...but how much worse? He's paranoid about the Via686B (and given my experiences with it in the last week I can't say as I blame him )

Also which is the better ALi Magik1 board, Asus A7A266 or IWill KA266? (I know the IWill lacks regular SDRAM slots but that doesn't matter, it's going to be DDR anyways).

 

[arod]

I havent seen any reviews lately but I have an ASUS A7A and it has been rock stable and plenty fast. It does have multipliers too build in which is something most 760 boards cant say.

 

[Noriaki]

The A7A266 does have multipliers?
I didn't think it did.

 

[arod]

yeah its got the swithes but i heard in a bios update this will eventually be done there

I got my 1.0 gig AXIA @ 1.4 stable

 

[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).

 

[Noriaki]

He has PC2100 DDR SDRAM.
The onboard audio can't be any worse than the Via MVP4 AC97 codec

Thanks for the mod tip.

 

[Noriaki]

Hey is there a fan on the north bridge of the A7A266?

 

[AndyHui]

Nope. Just a heatsink. Not even warm to touch. Currently using a Duron 800@880 on it. Haven't bothered to unlock it yet.

 

[Noriaki]

Thanks for the info AndyHui.