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Summary

After the speculations and rumors surrounding the allegedly flawed AMD760 DDR chipset, ASUS shows with the A7M266 that, using high quality components, the original AMD 761 DDR North Bridge can be successfully used to create a high performance thoroughbred mainboard that is not shy of even extreme overclocking. The key issue is quality, in design, as well as in components. The combination of these two factors has resulted in the probably fastest DDR and overall mainboard currently on the market. Flawless stability up to 148 MHz FSB even under endurance stress test conditions and some nifty features like hardware-based management of IRQ routing are just some of the high points of the A7M266. Nobody is perfect and there are some downsides like dysfunctional BIOS settings and out-of-spec voltages that can cause malfunctions of the board if not taken care of. The analysis and workarounds are posted as part of this review.

With ASUS, the situation is usually quite a bit different. A custom-tailored mainboard featuring the hardware workaround for the IRQ limitation in form of the application specific integrated circuitry (ASIC) is supplemented by the best BIOS layout available and a manual that is admirably terse in its content and explanations. Wrap all of this in impeccable quality and you have what the name ASUS stands for and what has earned them the #1 position amongst all mainboard manufacturers worldwide.

Perfection, though, stimulates the urge to find the one little black spot. Needless to say that it is a matter of patience and volume to track down one glitch or the other which could be an undocumented offtest jumper (you will remember this later) or a separate ATA 100 controller that causes some problems or some performance issues of the P4. Needless to say that in most cases the glitches are minor and won't impact the usability of the board in general.

The initial release of AMD760 chipset-based boards caused some minor disappointment since an alleged bug in the chipset decreased the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where the boards were unable to function at FSB frequencies above roughly 110 MHz. It did turn out, however, that the so-called chipset bug was caused primarily by wrong configuration of the mainboard layout and could be corrected by redesigning the board rather than respinning of the chipset. In fact, the current chipset revision is identical to the earlier version causing the noise problem with the initial layout.

Getting these issues under control was a matter of time and ASUS has, apparently, mastered them in their first release of the AMD760-based A7M266. According to the name, the board has been designed to run at the 133 MHz FSB resulting in a 266 MHz pin data rate. To make a short story even shorter, the operation was successful with the only question remaining whether there are any beauty marks and if so, where would those be.

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