Which is the better Asus board?

[DroolMAN!]

I am panning to order some new Athlon mobos with DDR-RAM support and I need some opinion from all you mobo experts in this forum who have experience with Asus boards.

I am inclined to stick with Asus boards because I have been using them from the very begining, TX97-E for Pentium and P2B for PII/PIII.

I have several Athlon machines running on the A7V133 with great success and I especially love the concept of having 4 built-in IDE channels since I have many IDE devices. Incidently, I never use the RAID functionality.

Back to the main topic. I am planning to order more Athlon machines with DDR-RAM support. There are currently 3 boards from Asus, A7V266 (VIA® KT266 Chipset), A7A266 (ALi® ALiMAGiK1 Chipset) and A7M266 (AMD® 761 Chipset).

Basically, the question is quite simple. Which is the better board? I also noticed that none of these boards have the Promise controller like the A7V133, correct me if I am wrong.

Your opinions are much appreciated.

TIA.

 

[AndyHui]

Go with the A7M266 or the A7V266.

The A7A266 is somewhat slower than the other two boards.

I would probably go with the A7V266...that should have multiplier adjustment; the A7M266 does not have multiplier adjustments.

 

[Jerethi]

I don't know too much about motherboards, but I did quite a bit of researching into those three asus boards. The A7M266 undoubtedly uses the best chipset, and will probably deliver the best performance, followed by the A7V266. I'm not too thrilled with the Ali chipset, so I can't recommend the A7A266 (as I understand it, that board is sort of designed for people who want to upgrade over time... making the transition from PC133 to PC1600 and so on in the coming years)

I'd also recommend reading all the reviews you can find here, and at toms about the difference in chipsets.

My two cents. Hope it's somewhat helpful.