ASUS A7N266-VM Motherboard

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ASUS A7N266-VM Motherboard

Ameya Dalvi, Jun 04, 2003 0000 hrs IST

The A7N266-VM is a low-end motherboard from ASUS thatùs based on the nVidia nForce 220D chipset.

Good assortment of features, Good CPU support, Excellent onboard audio, Inexpensive

Lacks a few recent features

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With PC technology maturing at a phenomenal pace, it's common for peripherals, especially motherboards to make an appearance in the market and then plunge into obsolescence within months due to their inability to support the recent, faster processors and newer peripherals. There are a very few boards that stand the test of time and simply refuse to die. The A7N266-VM from ASUS is one such example.

Introduction
This board has been present in the Indian market for over 15 months now and is still going strong. When the board made its debut, it used to support Athlon XP processors up to the speed of 1900. A BIOS update saw it support a maximum of 2100+. Subsequent BIOS updates brought in the support for the AMD CPUs based on the Thoroughbred core and pushed the compatible speeds to 2600+ thus prolonging its life span. But it wasn't just the support for the faster CPUs that made this board popular. This board from ASUS was always marketed as a value for money board (that's what the VM in the name stands for) and had a price tag that supported that claim. From our past experience, we can define value boards as ones with cut corners and only very basic features. This is exactly where this board differentiates itself from the rest of the pack.

What's the buzz about?
This board, based on nVidia's nForce 220D chipset, has a GeForce 2 MX AGP onboard, which still happens to be one the best onboard display solutions rivaled only by its elder brother the nForce2. In addition to that, it also has a 4X AGP slot for plugging in better AGP cards. If that's not enough, it also sports a 5.1 channel Dolby certified audio chip onboard that can put to shame other onboard sound chips and give Creative's SB-Live series of cards a run for their money.

As for the standard features, the A7N266-VM is a Micro ATX board that has a simple yet efficient layout and a robust build quality. It features three PCI slots other than the AGP 4X slot. It has two banks that support up to 1 GB of PC-2100 (266 MHz) DDR RAM, the capacity of each bank being 512 MB. It does not support the dual memory channels that are found on the other high-end nForce chipset boards. It has a couple of IDE connectors and a Floppy drive connector. Connectors for the second COM port and additional USB ports are also present. The back panel comprises of the usual PS/2 ports, a COM port, a Parallel port, a VGA-Out and a pair of USB 1.1 ports. Also present is the game port and the connectors for Line Out, Line In and Mic, which double up as Front, Rear and Center channel outputs respectively if you choose to use its 5.1 channel audio capabilities. The complete spec-list can be obtained from the ASUS Website.

The Driver Interface
Even though the onboard GeForce2 MX does not use the nVidia's Detonator drivers, the driver interface is very similar to that of Detonator's with all the usual DirectX and OpenGL options and the Overlay and the Digital Vibrance controls available.

The new 2.03 nForce drivers, bring about a refreshing change in the Audio interface with lots of customizations and wide array of features at your disposal. Other than tons of equalizers and presets, you can actually control the volume level of each and every channel in a multi-channel speaker setup thus obtaining a perfect output irrespective of your position from the audio source. Hats off to nVidia. To get a better idea about the driver interface, have a look at the images below.

Benchmark time
Going by what we have seen, this board is a good buy for its features alone. Now let us see if it can deliver when it comes to data crunching and put up a performance that can compliment its features.

The Test bench

CPU:

Motherboard:

Memory:

Graphics Card:

Hard Drive:

Optical Drive:

Power Supply:

Operating System:

Drivers:

Software used:

Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra 2003

Benchmarks continued

Performance at a glance
As we see from the benchmarks the performance of this motherboard is quite impressive. Lets not forget that the Krypton M7VIT Pro is a KT-400 Motherboard, hence has better specs and is expected to perform a lot better than this board. Inspite of that, in certain benchmarks, the A7N266-VM comes quite close to beating the KT-400 board and in fact does beat it in a couple of tests. When compared to the SiS 740 chipset motherboard, a board in its price range and a potential competitor, it manages to outperform it by a distance. This is truly commendable.

Another thing that the benchmarks throw light on is the onboard AGP, which proves to be atleast as good as a stand-alone GeForce 2 MX card. Also as I mentioned before, the onboard audio based on the tweaked Realtek ALC650 chipset delivers sound of the highest quality, which the non-nForce boards, can only dream of for now.

Final words
Good performance, impressive features and stable operation, what more can one ask for. What more? A good price tag, of course! I'm happy to say that the price is as impressive as the features that this board offers. The board can be yours for as little as Rs. 4150. Although a few of the recent features like AGP 8X and USB 2.0 are missing, at that price point you won't miss them. It's a solid entry-level motherboard for AMD CPUs. Rather that calling it a 'Jack of all trades', I would like to say that the ASUS A7N266-VM is a genuine all-rounder. It's an ideal solution for anyone looking to build an economical PC with decent gaming capabilities or watching DVDs with surround sound. So if you are planning to put together a good all-round PC in the range of Rs.25,000 to 30,000, this board is highly recommended. You just can't go wrong with it.

Test Unit Sourced From: Neoteric Informatique Pvt Ltd., Mumbai.