Asus A7M266
Board Revision: 1.03
BIOS Version: 1004A
Company Info
For many years, Asus has been regarded as being the best Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer. Providing excellent products has almost become a tradition. It is difficult to improve something that is already great to begin with, and moreover, it draws that much more attention if you don't always place first in a hardware review.
Hardware Features
The A7M266 has been available for some time now. It comes with a PCI sound chip
(CMI8738) and two line-ins, AGP Pro (4x), five PCI slots and one AMR slot. Though the motherboard design is prepared for four DIMM sockets, Asus only equips two of them. Asus possibly wants to avoid troubles that can occur with more than two DIMMs and fast memory timings. After all, DDR memory is still in its development stages and a long way from being standard technology. This can be clear seen by the fact that there are hardly any CL2 DDR DIMMs available.
Though the FSB and the multiplier can be set in the BIOS, Asus gives you the option to configure everything via some jumpers and DIP switches - that is quite useful for system integrators who want to prevent inexperienced users from altering the CPU settings my mistake.
The A7M266 is one of the most expensive AMD761 motherboards. Taken into account that there is nothing special on it except the PCI sound chip and the questionable AMR slot, I can imagine that many users could be wondering what's the extra value of the high price.
