MPN: A7M266DPA
Strengths: Reliability, stability. USB 2.0 included. BIOS-adjustable FSB speed (+/- 1 MHz) and voltages. 2 66MHz/64bit PCI slots. On-board CMI8738 6-channel audio.
Weakness: No onboard Ethernet, IDE-RAID, Firewire. USB 2.0 only on enclosed PCI card. No MIDI/game port. No FSB multiplier adjustment.
I've been using this mobo with 2x AthlonMP 1900+, 512MB unreg'd PC2100 DDR RAM, GeForce2 MX/400, 3com 3c905 NIC, and the included USB 2.0 card and an Atto UW-SCSI3 card in the 64bit PCI slots. Not a hitch, and right now it's overclocked from 133 to 146 MHz FSB (resulting in having Athlon "2100+" speeds...).
Right now it's got Red Hat 8.0 and WinXP Pro installed. The hardware monitoring works just fine with lm_sensors under Linux.
It's worth considering power and case/cooling issues when two hot Athlon monsters are to cooperate. Check out AMD's site for a suitable PSU (made for Pentium 4).
An SMP mobo can be expected to be primarily used for servers, so it's strange that there's no onboard ethernet or RAID.
Some A7M266-D revisions ship without onboard USB (1.1) connectors (due to a known bug in the AMD760MPX chipset), so a separate 4-port USB 2.0 PCI card is included. My revision (1.04) came with on-board USB included and working just fine, but the extra USB 2.0 card was included anyway!
Onboard and better-than-average sound is a nice bonus on an SMP board (inherently server oriented), but it seems like USB devices are preferred by ASUS over game port devices, as no game/MIDI port is to be found. As my board already had working USB 1.1 onboard, I'd have preferred Firewire over extra USB 2.0.
This is a high-quality, currently inexpensive, and well-supported board, and new BIOS revisions are still released to support new CPU offerings from AMD.
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TopStrengths: Dual CPU, 6 Channel audio, 2 66Mhz 64 bit PCI slots
Weakness: No on board USB or Raid controler
System is very fast but has ocasional crashes in XP. The system also seems to reboot for no reason. System is setup with 2 XP2100+ CPU's and 2 TT Volcano 7 Fans.
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TopStrengths: Quality asus board.
Weakness: Unique power supply.
Nice performance and tuning features.
The only power supply I could find that would support the board was the enermax eg465. If you are readying this and are building similar system I just saved you hours of searching.
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TopStrengths: Une carte sans problèmes! Même avec winXP... Bonne carte de son aussi incluse et USB 2.0 fourni.
Weakness: Port parrallèle, port série... N'avez vous pas appris des Macs?
Un outil essentiel pour toute entreprise qui requiert les double-processeur. Maitenant qu'AMD a surpassé Intel, il ne reste qu'à rendre ces grosses bêtes moins chaudes -- et moins bruyantes!
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TopStrengths: Record photoshop rendering times.
Weakness: Still crashing in XP professional.
Board purchase from JNS computers with 1 gig registered memory and processors and heatsinks (copper)profesionally installed in a case with 400W Power Supply. After adding 2 100GB Maxtor drives striped 0 with a Promise Raid card and a Radeon 8500, system refused to reboot after installation of the ATI driver. Removed the Radeon and replaced with a PNY nVidia 4, system booted OK. When in the bios Turbo mode system crashes about every 10 minutes. In the normal mode system seems stable but will lock up occasionally when surfing with XP Explorer. Hopefully a future bios revision will solve this problem.
System is lighting quick with two or three apps running which is my primary mode of operation.
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TopStrengths: Stability
Weakness: lose a pci slot to a usb card. Glad the usb card is 2.0!!
Easy to set up and configure. I was pleased with the multitasking ability and after adding heatspreaders to the ram and volcano #6 cpu colling fans-(the volcano#7 was to large for the board) I was able to overclock to xp2175 reliably.Fantastic if you like running numerous aps at the same time and video photo editing HUGE files.
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TopStrengths: fast fast fast
Weakness: no usb on board
i set this up with 2 1900+ MPs and a 15k SCSI hd. the system posted right away and getting up and running was no problem.
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Top
Asus A7M266-D Duall AMD SA, ATX, 3.5 GB, DDR, 266...
Strengths: Great Board: 2 Socket A CPU Support, Standard Power Supply of 400 Watts, Heat Monitoring via Windows App, More than 2 GIGS of Ram supported, PCI-X support for one slot on Motherboard, Overclocking...
Weakness: No Firewire, There were problems before with rebooting randomly, but that problem was fixed with new bios update from Asus.
Awesome, Awesome, and more Awesome. The motherboard is great for Windows 2000 Server/Windows .NET Server/Red Hat 7.3 SMP Server and almost any other OS you thow at it. I currently run the latest .Net Server on this baby and it is fast due to my wonderful 10000 RPM SCSI Hard Drives and Ultra SCSI controller.
Very Cool,
Network Admin with CCNA, CCNP, MCP, MCSE, A+ Certified
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