A7M266-D Experience

Getting to know the board

The A7M266-D came in a nicely designed box that was no fuss and no frills. Inside you get the following:

• Asus A7M266-D motherboard
  
• Asus USB2.0 4-port controller card
  
• User’s manual
  
• Quick Setup guide
  
• Quick Reference card
  
• ATX back-plate I/O shield
  
• IDE/Floppy Cables

As far as manuals go, Asus has always written easy to understand manuals that contain lots of diagrams to show you where each feature of the board is located. The A7M266-D manual follows the same layout and style of previous Asus manuals so those who are already familiar should feel right at home.

The Quick Setup guide is kind of an oxymoron for Asus. The guide itself is thicker than the manual itself and is quite complicated. In fact, taking the time to read the “Quick” setup guide will probably slow you down. The point of a quick guide is to make things fast and easy for the end-user; reduce the amount of text and increase the amount of pictures and diagrams. Hopefully the next Asus Quick Setup guide will contain less than 40 pages.

Installation and setup

Setting up the board was an easy affair and everything went smoothly. But just when we thought we had everything setup correctly, the A7M266-D refused to operate properly. It froze on us a few times and on numerous occasions produced video corruption. We proceeded to try the same components on another motherboard (an Iwill XP333-R) and they all worked as expected.

We took out our batch of processors and memory modules to test with the board only to find out that changing memory and processors didn’t help by much. First, we had trouble booting the A7M266-D with two processors. We only had Athlon MP processors to work with and so using “unsupported” Athlon MPs wasn’t the issue. We also tried different speed grades with no avail. Eventually, after mixing and matching a whole bunch of different memory and processor configurations we were left with using Athlon MP1500’s which run at 1.33GHz.

Losing your memory

Memory installation was also somewhat problematic as well as interesting. According to AMD’s 760 MPX specifications, the chipset supports up to 4GB of Registered PC2100 DDR RAM. We obtained 4 PC2100 DDR sticks from Corsair, each weighing in at 1GB to test with the boards. Installing 3 sticks gave us the expected amount of 3GB when booting up the board. However, when we installed the fourth stick of memory, the memory count during boot-up didn’t display any information. When we entered the BIOS, we were greeted with the following:

1MB of PC2100 DDR RAM

Unbuffered RAM in 3 sockets!

“Installed Memory: 1MB.” At first we thought the forth stick was faulty but we swapped modules in different combinations and all 4 memory modules worked properly when only 3 were installed. According to other manufacturers, it is possible to install four 1GB modules into a 760 MPX board but only 3.5GB will be available for system use. However, this still does not explain our 1MB phenomenon.

To test unbuffered memory support we chose to use three types of memory modules from Corsair, Crucial and Mushkin. Asus states that only the first 2 DIMM sockets support unbuffered memory but our tests indicate otherwise. We installed three different unbuffered modules into 3 sockets and to our surprise the board worked.