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The A7V266 is Asus's newest foray into the DDR market after their very successful A7M266 and A7A266 motherboard products. This new board uses the newer Via Apollo KT266 chipset consisting of the VT8366 Super Northbridge and the VT8233 Southbridge. While many gamers and overclockers have the A7M266 and have been very happy with it, many were disappointed that multiplier adjustments weren't included (unless you do the solder job on the board and effectively destroy your warranty and/or the board). The A7V266 does it right this time with both dipswitch and BIOS options for V-Core, Multiplier, FSB and also RAM voltage. The FSB is adjustable with 1MHz increments and the board also has adjustable FSB/PCI/MEM ratios.

The other main feature of note was the inclusion of the high-quality 6-channel 3D surround audio with the optional C-Media CMI8738 audio controller. This onboard chip eliminates the cost of an additional soundcard and adds dynamic realism to your favorite games, MP3s or DVDs. Flipping through the users manual it also mentioned full support for Dolby 5.1 and EAX. Currently a decent 5.1 sound card is over $150AUD so this could be a good saving. I did use the onboard audio with my Koss Headphones and quality was very good. CS was getting great directional sound and while I don't have a 5.1 setup to test this with a decent sub and speakers I'm sure a re-visit to this board will be happening ASAP.

Specifications
Socket A
VIA VT8366 Northbridge
- FSB @200/266mhz supporting CPU's up to 1.4ghz (currently)
- AGP x4 via AGP Pro slot and PCI Advanced high performance memory controller.
- 5 PCI slots
VIA VT8233 Southbridge
- High Bandwidth V-Link controller
- Integrated Fast Ethernet LPC
- Supports 6 Memory Banks using 3 x 184pin 2.5v DDR Dimms
- Supports a Max 3gb Memory
- Smart Card Reader (SCR) interface support (still haven't been able to find one in Australia)
- 6 x USB ports as well as the usual array of Serial, PS2 and Parallel ports

Layout

click for larger (different) pic

It's great to see some thought goes into layout these days. PSU connector is right next to the IDE controllers which I found very easy to access and didn't get in the way of the HSF like some other boards. Space around the socket was very good - using the huge Global Win WBK38 HSF it just touched a capacitor on the top corner of the board but didn't cause any problems. The end of the ram slots were for once not obstructed by the AGP slot at all so removing the video card isn't needed when adding/removing ram. The floppy port is very low on the board and can cause problems in full tower cases. Using a cube case like I do it was actually better as I looped the cable under the board and into the left bay.

I rang Asus in relation to RAID in this board as it hasn't been announced (or provided) but room has been made for it with IDE 3 and 4 spots very high in top right corner and space for the (presumably) Promise chipset. This is apparently for a future revision of the board (-R version maybe). When first discussed with Asus we spoke about a A7V266-D but this morning that was changed to a A7M266-D. As with MSI it looks like Asus has dropped the VIA chipset solution for a AMD chipset. While this is only speculation at this stage Asus have said samples are due in late August. We can only hope a cheap dual AMD solution isnt too far away. Another thing missing off the review board was a fan on the Northbridge that we have all become accustomed to and appears in the website photos of the board. Asus did mention that the fan was still being discussed and no final decision was made at the time. During testing I did feel the chipset and it was room temp only and was definately not hot enough to need a fan.

NEXT PAGE - Benchmarks, Overclocking and Conclusions

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