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There are different ways to go about overclocking capabilities, one way to look at it is to check the highest FSB setting the board will be able to run at, the second way is to take a known CPU and check the highest clock speed that it will run at. Since the A7N266E does not have Vre adjustments in the BIOS, the only way to increase the core voltage is via jumpers. Luckily, the voltage jumpers work even in jumperless mode (unlike on the P4B266). In terms of overclocked stability, the A7N266E was able to keep the XP1800+ running without problems at 143 MHz bus speed (1646 MHz clock) which is not bad but does not reach some other boards where the same CPU was able to get up to over 1700 MHz.

Regardless of this, we also wanted to know what the maximum FSB was that we could push the board to. In this case, we used a 1.2 GHz Athlon MP (unlocked) and were able to crank the FSB to the highest setting available in the BIOS, that is 172 MHz. With two PC2100 DIMMs, the system got into W2K but crashed immediately thereafter. Using a single (128 MB, single sided) DIMM, there were no apparent problems, though.

The highest FSB setting in the BIOS, that is 172 MHz is actually workable, however, with the caveat that the memory load needed to be reduced to one single sided DIMM. I did not go into extensive benchmarking since the system appeared somewhat sluggish at that speed and I didn't want to blow it, however, Expendable was running, Photoshop was running and that's good enough at this point.

Conclusion

It sure is nice to have everything together on one board, and not only that but also to be able to use it in at least some midrange applications. Most integrated solutions are pure bred office machines which is enough to justify their existence. The nForce chipset somewhere between the office box and a gaming rig. Certainly, for older games, the integrated graphics suffice and there are enough oddballs around who just get off on clockspeed but never made it past a 14" monitor.

In all seriousness, the integrated graphics are very nice, the sound is superb and the entire combo would be my favorite solution for a micro-ATX board. For a full gaming system, the onboard graphics are a bit anemic, particularly with regard to visually more advanced games. In any mainboard solution, the price component is always a critical factor and, thus, the move to the nForce 415D leaving out the graphics controller is a logical step for nVidia. In other words, a lower price point by sacrificing some of the flexibility will make the chipset much more competitive in the grand scheme.

Despite the fact that I am quite enthusiastic about the A7N266E, there are still some issues that need to be addressed, particularly the performance hit with 6 memory banks populated, caused by defaulting into "Super Compatibility Mode". If MSI could afford to eliminate the reduction in memory bus frequency, ASUS should be able to do the same and it should be number one priority.

Other issues of the board concern the surround sound. In stereo mode, the sound is excellent, however, I have not been able to get more than two speakers to work which has been blamed by ASUS on using the wrong applications lacking support for surround sound. A very simple solution for this dilemma would be to include a short sound test utility on the install CD that addresses all different configurations.

In conclusion, the A7N266E is one hell of a board, the memory benchmarks are a bit on the low side, however, in real applications, none of this is visible stressing once again the issue of how relevant synthetic benchmarks are for real world performance. The overclocking capabilities of the board are absolutely superb while offering the unique safety margin of a fixed PCI bus frequency. All in all, the A7N266E is a great board but now it is time to make it even better.

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