BIOS and Ocing

USB

As is the trend these days, the A7N sports a total of six USB ports. Two reside at the back of the board in their usual spots; the other four require the use of a connector. We were a little stunned when we saw what ASUS had provided. It seems as though the connector that is provided has a reserve power of its own – note the capacitors on the riser card. Most other manufacturers merely supply a cable that connects it to the board. While the standard USB port does supply power, not all USB devices are created equal. Some require a bit more juice in order to function.

The MCP

BIOS Features

In terms of overclocking features, the A7N266 is no slouch. With the ability to crank the system all the way from 100MHz-172MHz you’re sure to find your sweet spot somewhere in there. Although, the board does not feature 1MHz increments, the 2MHz jumps should be just fine for most us. Losing sleep over the possibility of gaining another 10MHz with fine-tuning just isn’t worth it, considering the performance gained would amount to under one percentage point.

We were a little disappointed by the fact that the core and RAM voltages could only be adjusted via jumpers. This isn’t a big problem, as you will have determined what voltages your system needs, and then never really have to touch the jumpers again. The CPU voltages can be adjusted from 1.675V up to 1.85V, in .025V increments. The DDR voltage can be changed from 2.5V to 2.7V via .1V increments.

In terms of RAM options, the board gives you the ability to adjust memory timings via a single drop down menu. We’re not to sure what their settings mean, but the standard 2T speed setting is there, along with a somewhat cryptic “2T Turbo” RAM setting. We ran the tests with the Turbo enabled and everything seemed to go just peachy.

Using all the stuff on this board, we got our 1800+ up to a not so glorious 1.64GHz, up 100MHz from default. We’re inclined to say that this was mainly CPU limited, as we hit this same wall when we tried this CPU on another board.

AGP

The A7N has the relatively unused AGP Pro slot. This standard appeared quite a while ago, while companies have yet to start using it, it’s nice to know the slot is here and prepared for what the future may bring. The AGP slot also has a safety feature built into it. It prevents the use of older 3.3V AGP cards from damaging the motherboard. A little red LED next to the slot will light up in case this happens, and prevents the motherboard from booting up. Current AGP video cards run on 1.5V