Asus A7M266-D

The Board

Asus was one of the first companies to announce a dual Athlon board sometime last year. We finally get to see what it’s like in person and while there are some issues, we’re pleased overall. When you’ve worked with as many Asus products as we have, you eventually come to expect certain features that don’t normally appear on other products from other manufacturers, or that you expect some of the highest quality components around.

Asus A7M266-D

Ports close up

Fully ATX12V compliant

The A7M266-D is built to use an ATX12V power supply, so those of you with older ATX power supplies (no matter how much wattage they may output) will have to upgrade to ATX12V units. We had expected Asus to include a 12V drive capable for auxiliary input for older ATX users but there isn’t one on the board. AMD supposedly has an issue with manufacturers that don’t comply to “standards” and with Asus being a premier member of AMD’s new approval and validation plan, we’re not entirely surprised that the A7M266-D is ATX12V only.

Extra features

One of the Asus-only features that it has been using for a few years now is the iPanel – a drive bay panel that displays temperature information and other useful controls. This is a proprietary module that can be purchased separately from the board and it does not work on other boards. There is an Asus-specific pin-out array on the A7M266-D that is designed specifically for the iPanel. Hopefully other manufacturers will be adding similar features onto their boards as well.

Asus iPanel ready

Server management option?

No heatsink holes

Other notable board features on the board include a mysterious 50-pin solder layout patch for what is presumably a server management add-on. Our revision of the board doesn’t come with this feature implemented so we’ll have to assume that this feature may only be available to special OEM customers.

If you take a close look around the processor sockets, you’ll notice that there are supposed to be 4 holes for each socket that allow special heatsinks to be attached by screws to the motherboard. These 4 holes are not present on the A7M266-D and are instead replaced by empty soldering circles with no apparent application. If anyone is thinking of using the enormous heatsinks on 760 MPX motherboards, be prepared to be disappointed. There’s just not enough room on the board with all complicated maze of components present. Fortunately, reference heatsinks from Taisol install well and work great.

Protecting the delicate traces

4GB of goodness

Home grown USB 2.0

Asus includes its own USB 2.0 card with the A7M266-D to cover for the lack of onboard USB features. The card is a 4-port USB 2.0 card powered by an NEC controller, which also happens to be about the only controller out there that supports USB 2.0. Be warned though. USB isn’t a peer-to-peer connection technology and relies on the host processor to compute many of its functions. This takes a toll on the processor if you’re a heavy USB user – moving the Microsoft USB IntelliMouse takes more than 10% of an Athlon’s processing power.