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Test Configuration

The A7V266-E was tested in the following configuration:

• ASUS A7V266-E (BIOS Rev. 1002)
• AMD Athlon XP1900+
• ASUS V8200 GeForce3 Ti 500 Deluxe
• 256 MB Mushkin High Performance PC2100 DDR
• IBM DTLA 307020
• Pioneer 12x CDROM
• 3Com 905c 10/100T Ethernet controller
• Windows 98 (first edition)

Without doubt, the A7V266 is one of the most stable boards I have ever come across. Never mind the two phases only of the power circuitry which is not comparable to other designs anyway, the A7V266-E just appears to blow away everything else in terms of how high it can drive a given CPU. There was no problem at all getting the XP 1900+ up to a whopping 1750 MHz, the highest clock speed at which the system would boot into Windows was 1774 MHz! Unfortunately, at that speed, it did crash immediately but with a slightly better HSF combo there is a good chance to keep it alive long enough for some benchmarks.

At 1752 MHz the system would start showing the first shakes, all benchmarks were, therefore, run at 1727 MHz

One Short Word About BIOS Revisions

After the release of the A7V266-E, ASUS appears to be in a frenzy trying to break the record of new BIOS releases set some years ago with the P5A. The Life-Update utility makes flashing the BIOS a regular piece of cake, however, there are a few caveats. After updating the BIOS to the latest (1004e beta) revision the system became extremely unstable and barely made it into Windows at 133 MHz bus speed. Interestingly, the HW monitor now showed 1.88Vre, again, regardless of whether manual jumper settings or CPU VID settings were used. CPU temperatures actually went up to the low sixties in this case but again, there was no stability to run anything. Clearing the CMOS did not improve the situation.

Now, here is the catch 22 situation one needs to be aware of. Using Life-Update, the old BIOS file is not saved but simply overwritten. Since the 1002 version of the BIOS is still posted on the ASUS website, this did not appear to be such a problem, however, Life-Update does not allow to flash to any older BIOS revision than the one currently running. In this case, the only resort is to go the old-fashioned way and flash from a DOS prompt. This is a problem that anybody running operating systems other than Win9x needs to be aware of. Further aggravating is the fact that there are close to a dozen flash utilities listed on the ASUS website and only one of them works but there is no indication which one. To make a long story short: Aflash.exe is the one that needs to be used.

Keep this in mind when updating to the latest BIOS, otherwise, it could become a long, tedious and frustrating experience to get the system back to where it was, in case there are problems with the new BIOS files (unheard of, I know)

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