Clash of the KT266A Titans!
Motherboards from Abit, Asus, Soyo and MSI Do Battle!

By, Marco Chiappetta
December 18, 2001

THE ASUS A7V266-E's BIOS:

        

        

The Asus A7V266-E is also equipped with an Award BIOS, but this time it is the newer V6.00 that has been making the rounds for the past year or so.  All of the same functionality as V4.51 is there, wrapped in a slightly different user interface.  I'm not quite sure if I like the new interface better or not, but it works and this board performed well, so we won't complain! :)  The A7V266-E's BIOS is very complete, but not quite on the level of some of the other boards when it comes to overclocking.  In the second screenshot  you can see what the overclocking options look like.  We'll cover overclocking a bit later in the article though...

Layout and Quality
Nice and Neat...

THE ASUS A7V266-E's LAYOUT:

We spent some time inspecting the Asus A7V266-E, and found some interesting features that should be brought to your attention...

       

The external case connectors look like every other ATX compliant board.  The microphone jack, however,  takes on multiple roles depending on how the board is configured.  It can act as a standard microphone jack, a center channel or subwoofer out.  At first glance, the slot configuration looks ideal, but pay close attention to that last slot...it looks like a reversed PCI slot.  That's an "ACR" or Audio / Communication Riser slot (it's Asus' version of a CNR slot).  This isn't a feature many do-it-yourselfer's are looking for, but it will probably help Asus land some OEM wins.  Considering the board has very good C-Media CMI8738 audio on-board and RAID, 5 PCI slots and an AGP Pro slot should be plenty.  There is ample room around the CPU socket to accommodate larger coolers, but if your cooler has a large clip it may get in the way of the first DIMM slot.  We had about a millimeter of space between the first DIMM slot and our cooler's clip...which was a little too close for comfort.  It would be nice to see a little more space between the socket and DIMM slots in a future revision.

While we're looking at the socket, we should mention Asus C.O.P. (CPU Overheating Protection) feature.  The A7V266-E doesn't monitor the internal diode found in the newer Athlon XPs, but it will throttle your CPU speed or shut your system down if the thermal probe under the socket reaches a certain temperature.  This feature should help in case the fan on your cooler dies, but we weren't courageous enough to thoroughly test this feature.  We only had one Athlon XP in the lab and weren't about to burn in up just yet!

       

The secondary USB connector plate was a bit different than the simple cables we're used to seeing bundled with most other boards.  In the middle picture you can see some of the excellent silkscreen tables that adorn the A7V266-E.  This board is also completely configurable using DIP switches.  The silk-screens make it nice and easy to set the switches without having to dig out the User's manual.  We also removed the active cooling on the A7V266-E's Northbridge and were again pleased to find Asus applied thermal paste as well.

    

The case headers were all clearly labeled, mounted at the bottom corner of the board.  Both the IDE and RAID connectors were also well placed, parallel to the edge of the board just behind the DIMM sockets, but the floppy header could have been located better.  It's mounted way down at the bottom of the board between the 4th and 5th PCI slot.  If you plan on using the A7V266-E in a full tower case where the floppy drive is mounted at the top, you'll need a really long cable...

Soyo has the Goods Too...