MSI K7T 266 Pro vs ASUS A7M266 DDR

[Guest]

I am building a gaming system.

My basic specs are:
1.2ghz Athlon C
256meg Samsung PC2100
Elsa Gladiac Geforce2 Ultra
Soundblaster Live Value
ASUS A7M266 OR MSI K7T266 Pro

The question is, should I go with the ASUS or the MSI? I know there has been problems with the MSI board. Please no other board recommendations or DDR comments, just simply, ASUS A7M266 or MSI K7T.

Thanks!

Shaidar

 

[upec]

I will go with Asus A7M266. It offer better performance.

 

[stable]

GAMER SYSTEM? Avoid the A7M266 like the plague. With only 1 exclusive Interrupt slot, this is NOT a gamer system.

You are still best off going with the K7Master, even with only 2-DIMM slots.

Steve Benoit

Stable Technologies
'The way IT should be!'

 

[Guest]

Eh? Pardon me...did I miss something here Steve? "Avoid the A7M266 like the plague" ??

I certainly respect your opinion, but on what grounds do you make this bold statement? Please be specific, as I have yet to see a totally bad review of this board.

Thanks!

Shaidar

 

[hatimh]

I have in my hand an A7M266 right now, I have been researching for LONG time, and believe me, Steve knows what he's talking about. I would most definitely go for the MSI K7 Master S if I were you, actually I'm going out to buy one in a couple of days. First I have to get a refund on my A7M266 though

Beer is the devil's piss.

 

[Booky]

It's official as of the .10c BIOS for my K7T266 Pro that it has passed the AMD 760 boards in all benchmarks. Although it did tie 3 times in the memory test, but beat it several times. I had a score of 534/681 before the BIOS and 608/763 after the new BIOS. I will run 3DMark2001 again to see if there was a performance boost there also. My score was 3845 with .10b, I will run it in morning after church. I also want to say that I will now recommend this board to anyone for the stability is great. It was very shaky before the BIOS and now is solid for 14 hours so far. The BIOS fixed somethig with the memory and 256MB sticks. If you have any questions just ask and I'll try to answer or im sure stable will if I can't.

Crap, all the good ones are already taken.

 

[Guest]

What is the specific reason(s) for not using the A7M266 hatimh?

Shaidar

 

[Guest]

Booky, perhaps you can email me then. I received my K7T266Pro bundle the other day as I make my switch from Intel to AMD. The bundle also came with 1.33ghz CPU, one stick 256mb Crucial 2.5, and Taisol742 HSF. Install went ok. Installed just bundle, GF2 video card and 10.80 drivers. Ran 3DM2001 and got 960, that's nine six zero points. My 550 katmai and V3 got more points. Then I decided to load the 4 in 1s and that's when all hell broke lose. Lockups, BSOD, not recognizing the vid card, not let me changing the vid card drivers, reformatted again and everytime I loaded the 4 in 1's my system was toast. I got fed up and since it wasn't the board I ordered anyway (ordered the A7M) I will RMA tomorrow because I wanted the K7 Master. But if I could get this board running then I might reconsider. I also have the SB Live! Gamer 5.1 and WinME. I also loaded Bios 10b. Didn't get around to putting 10c in since I was having so much trouble. I ran Sandra memory benches before I started having the troubles and got in the 800s and was thinking, OMG this system will be awesome and I haven't even O/C it yet. Then I ran 3DM2001 and got the 960 and thought UGH!

 

[Guest]

Steve,

You say to avoid the A7M266 like the plague becuase it has only one exclusive interrupt slot?

Is that your only reason? If there are more please tell me becuase I have read nothing but fantastic reviews on this board.

Shaidar

 

[Guest]

Well, I don't know what Steve is talking about, but I will say this, until Stable KT266 boards get out, go AMD760, which leaves you with A7M266, or K7Master, Both are great boards. The biggest difference that I will note is that A7M doesn't have Multiplier adjustments, so that could effect your decision if you want to overclock.
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by ajwr_2000 on 04/29/01 08:37 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[IntelConvert]

Sounds like the bundle Monarch sells. If so, why not contact their tech support???

 

[Booky]

If you still have the board I will be more than happy to get on Roger wilco or ICQ with you and discuss it. If you don't have them then email me at booky@327th.com, I will read it way faster. Like I said above I will be happy to help you. I think you have same problems as I did, it is related to the 256MB sticks and thats what .10c fixed, so my system has been running very solid for 3 days now. Let me guess when you reboot is says display hase a problem? hehe that and everything unstable is related to the memory trust me. .10c fixes it all. I score 608/755 in sandra as a average.
oppps sorry forgot to put ICQ # here it is #110016824

Crap, all the good ones are already taken.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Booky on 04/30/01 08:41 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[ApollyonSon]

Booky, this is great news to hear about the .10c BIOS version for the K7T266. Is your board the one with R127 and 103 resistor or R126 with 102 resistor? What OS are you using? I've just started to install all my components, that I've bought and pieced together, today. Two problems that I ran into in the early going. 1) After installing Win/2000, the pc would lock up after the final reboot, a little after the Win/2000 logo screen. The fix was to load optimized defaults in BIOS. 2)The other problem I had was with the IDE RAID. I tried to set up a RAID 0 with two identical hard drives, but the hard drives were not detected, not even on the primary IDE controller. I'm not sure if these hard drives had data on them or not, but I wasn't even given the chance to fdisk or format them even using a startup disk. They were totally unseen by the BIOS. The fix was to move the jumpers on the hard drives to cable select. They are now recognized, but I have not yet started setting up the array until tommorrow. I don't think the second problem has anything to do with the board, since I was able to install Win/2000 using another hard drive set as a master with no problem (just a FYI for anyone that runs into the same problem). My board by the way, is the one with R127 and 103 resistor.

An insecure moment becomes a life long torment.

 

[Ncogneto]

While I am not Steve, yes I believe that is the reason he advises to avoid that system for a gaming platform. Don't know what is up with ASUS lately, but only one unshared pci slot is a joke. This mandates that your sound card has to be placed there and any other add-on cards you mioght have ( modem, capture,nic, etc etc) getts a shared slot and can result in multiple headaches. It is a good board if you only need to run your video and sound card and don't have alot of other cards as well. But most gamers seem to have multiple cards in there system.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[khha4113]

<b>one exclusive interrupt slot?</b>
I think what he meant is <b>A7M266</b> only has the PCI slot #3 not sharing IRQ with other devices, but I think he mistakened <b>A7V</b> series which have <b>Promise controller</b> on board with <b>A7M266</b> that doesn't.
PCI slot 1 shares with AGP.
PCI slot 2 shares with Promise controller in <b>A7V</b> series. I think in <b>A7M266</b> this one is not sharing with other.
PCI slot 4 and 5 (or AMR slot) share with each other as well as USB controller.
However, so far I haven't experienced any problem with IRQ sharing between my devices with my A7V.
In fact, I have my SoundBlaster Live!, my Winmodem and USB controller sharing IRQ 5 on PCI slot 4 and 5. A network card on PCI slot 2 and my Adaptec AHA-2940U2W SCSI controller on PCI slot 3. I leave PCI slot 1 empty since I don't want getting any trouble with my AGP card.

 

[Guest]

Yes, I was for a while thinking about getting an A7V mobo, and what I found out was that Slots 1 and 2 did share with AGP and Promise, but the 2nd slot they said put the Network Card in, because it won't need the IRQ Promise is using.

 

[Guest]

Hey Impala and booky, ive heard somewhere that the new 10 and 11 series Nvidia drivers are made for the GeForce 3, and can actually kill your performance numbers on a lower model card such as your gf2, so that users of the geforce2 should stick with the 6.xx and 7.xx series of drivers, just a thought, to help you out, as for booky, can you help me out also?? im getting no where near you, have you done the r126 mod?? because i havnt, but when i do i heard its a real NICE board, and beats out the 760 series, leave me a personal message or email me thanx a lot man!
-hottnikkz