A7M266-D BIOS

Inside the BIOS

Asus has always been fond of using Award BIOS and continues to do so with the A7M266-D. For comparison, Tyan has been using Phoenix BIOS on all of its dual Athlon boards and while Phoenix makes simple to use BIOSes, they’re too simple and often lack many features that are found in Award’s BIOSes.

Inside the Advanced features, the Award BIOS displays the true speed of both processors that are installed on the board. Ever since AMD announced its performance naming scheme, people have been skeptical of its success mainly due to the fact that performance ratings were used back in the Pentium days by AMD and Cyrix with no success. Fortunately for AMD, the Athlon has built such a polished reputation for itself that this time the naming schemes have been rather subliminal and more and more people are calling it by what AMD intends. Nevertheless, it’s always very useful to know the true speed of your processor.

More horsepower!

Plenty of tweaking options

Front-side bus frequencies are controlled either by dip-switches or in-BIOS. If the dip-switches are enabled, the BIOS settings will be locked to “By Jumper” mode. While Asus doesn’t have voltage or multiplier settings, it has a setting called System Performance which has two options: Turbo and Normal. This reminds of older AMD single Athlon chipsets that had certain BIOS toggles that improved system performance by a small percentage if any. The performance difference we saw between Normal and Turbo mode was 0% to negligible improvements.

The A7M266-D also has memory and AGP features inside the BIOS’ Advanced features menu. In this section, you’re able to change things such as CAS latency, and AGP speed. A feature we’re also seeing more often is the ability to enable and disable AGP Fast Writes. Not all AGP cards support fast-writes but all the latest cards from ATI and NVIDIA should be able to utilize AGP fast writes. A lot of the arcane features have to do with memory and or AGP timing and how they interact with each other. For example, you can set latency between AGP and system memory to improve such things as AGP texturing speeds where a graphics card is using system memory to store game textures.

A lot of the features will require deep manual reading as well as some trial and error experience in order to understand what they do and how they affect system performance and stability. In our own experience, we found that enabling Fast Writes was problematic for NVIDIA cards in Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Professional (less in XP). Current GeForce4 cards however should work just fine.