ASUS A7N266-E Review February 11, 2002 Sarju Shah

Introduction

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To many the nForce should prove to be an interesting board. This is the first time that the consumer can buy a handful of components, and be done assembling a relatively powerful system with a minimum of time invested. Sure the video card maybe a little weak with what is coming out now, but it beats out every other onboard solution on the market. Combine that with the Southbridge, which contains an audio processor that gives the SB Live! a run for its money. If there was ever a time to consider an all-onboard solution, this is it. We’re sure many of you out there are the sole repositories of computer knowledge for friends and family. How many times have you been asked to troubleshoot? Assemble? Provide answers to seemingly inane questions? With an nForce board, you could build your technically deficient chums a decent computer with very basic support structure. One driver install and you’re done setting the machine up. No tracking down weird conflicts or random drivers. It’s all done with one file. This is the perfect product for a midnight infomercial!

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What comes with it?

The A7N266-E nForce board is a good example of how to work this chipset. The board comes with quite a few goodies packed in it. To go with the decent graphics, ASUS bundled two games – Messiah and Star Trek New Worlds. Not the most recent of games, but I think I can safely say that I’ve never seen games bundled with a motherboard – so technically this would be the best game bundle so far.

Manual-wise, we were pretty impressed. Most motherboard manuals have increased in quality over the years, but I think things just took another step forward. Besides the usual manual that comes with the board, there is a quick setup guide and a quick reference card. The first should help beginners with the basics; the latter is useful to anyone - even if its only useful feature is an easy to read layout of all the switches (where the power, LED and reset switches go). I don’t know how many times I’ve fumbled through a manual looking for that info.

The Board

ASUS A7N266-E
Chipset	NVIDIA nForce 420D - IGP 128/MCP-D
Memory	3 184-pin DIMM sockets - up to 1.5GB
BIOS	Smart BIOS
Drive Connectors	1 FDD, 2 ATA100 Channels
Slots	1 AGP Pro, 6 PCI, 1 ACR
Fan Headers	2 Fan connectors
USB	3 USB Controllers - 6 USB connectors
Network	Realtek LAN

SIDEBAR: The network controller on the A7N cannot be disabled, or at least we couldn’t find anything.

Board Features

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RAM banks

The way the nForce chipset works is very interesting. Despite the fact that the board has three RAM slots, the board can only accept five banks of RAM. Banks of RAM are defined by the strips of chips on a stick of RAM, for simplicities sake. If you have a stick of RAM with chips on both sides, it will use two banks on the motherboard. Generally the larger memory modules have chips on both sides – 256MB, 512MB, and 1024MB. What this boils down to is that you must pay attention to how much RAM you buy when you assemble your system. It’s a shame that this fact is not better known. This pretty much makes the third slot useless, as it can only be filled with a stick RAM that isn’t very large. You can only have two double-sided sticks in the system, so make them count. The first slot is one array, and the other two slots count as the second set.

Another tidbit particular to the nForce is that it runs best if you have two sticks of RAM. The way the memory subsystem is designed you are better off putting a stick in each of the separate slot groupings.

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Video

If you’ve read anything about the onboard video on the nForce boards, it’s nothing to write home about. The performance rivals that of a GeForce2 MX. We originally checked out the performance of the graphics in our nForce preview, it’s pretty safe to say not much has changed since then. We’re pretty sure that the majority of you out there aren’t going to be buying this board for its graphics capabilities – you’re all going to be taking advantage of the AGP port, right? On a slight tangent, for those of you still deciding on what board to get, you might want to wait a little longer. NVIDIA announced that it would be releasing a chipset called the 415-D - all the Dolby Digital goodness sans the onboard video. This reduces the number of onboard items, while at the same time cutting the cost of the board by an unknown amount. We’re going to guess that the board will arrive at a price slightly above a $100, seeing as boards based on the 420-D go for approximately $150.

Layout

The clean design that this board has pleases us to no end. Clearance around the CPU is ample, and will allow just for about any sort of cooler. We’re exceedingly happy to note that there are no capacitors in the way of the heatsink clips. There are quite a few boards out on the market that place the socket within a hair of a capacitor. For those whose fingers aren’t dainty little lotus petals, putting on a heatink can become a nightmare.

The rest of the board followed up in good fashion. Most of the connectors are in good positions. The only one we would like to move, and this totally depends on your preference, is the second fan connector. It’s way up at the top of the board, in close proximity to the RAM slots and the CPU fan connector. Many people have fans at the front of their case, generally right next to the power connectors.


SIDEBAR: The onboard video connector is in the same place a second Serial port would go. If you need the second serial port, you can just attach the connector to the board, although it does take up a card opening on the back of the board.

BIOS and Ocing

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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.

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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



SIDEBAR: GeForce4 for the Mac, I wonder if more games will appear for that OS now,

System Setup

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AMD Athlon XP 1800+

ASUS A7N266-E
ABIT KR7A-RAID
ASUS A7V266-E
MSI K7T266 Pro-RU

VIA 4in1 version 4.37

256MB Corsair PC2100 DDR SDRAM

NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 reference board
Driver version Detonator 23.11

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
AFREEY 12X DVD-ROM

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

Desktop Resolution: 1024x768x32

Benchmarks

3DMark2000 ver 1.1 – 16-bit, 16-bit textures
3DMark 2001 - 16-bit, compressed textures

Quake 3 Retail - High Quality
Serious Sam Retail - Normal (16-bit)
Castle Wolfenstein MP Test - no compressed textures, (32-bit)
Content Creation 2002
Business Winstone 2001


SIDEBAR: For the hardcore

Nvidiot!

3Dmark 2000/2001

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3Dmark2000 – Directx 7.0

3DMark 2001 - DirectX 8.0

Notes

This scrappy little nForce board is essentially going punch for punch in 3DMark. No board came out on top by any reasonable margin, they are all pretty much neck and neck, except for the MSI KT266A board.


SIDEBAR: The sites for the various motherboard manufacturers are getting more and more useful. Many have support forums and other assorted tidbits. Check out the ASUS page for instance, you’ll find loads of stuff you never would have expected.

3DMark2001 Framerates

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3DMark 2001 - Car Chase

3DMark 2001 - Dragothic

3DMark 2001 - Lobby

3DMark 2001 - Nature

SIDEBAR: Two brothers in Bermuda were killed by the same taxi and driver, carrying the same passenger, while they were riding the same moped on the same street -- but exactly a year apart. Eskine Lawrence Ebbin and his brother Neville were both 17 when they died.

Serious Sam

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Serious Sam - OpenGL

Notes

The ASUS A7N drops behind by a little bit in some of the tests but it manages a good finish once the resolution is turned up a few notches.

SIDEBAR: `Be what you would seem to be' - or, if you'd like it put more simply - `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'

-Lewis Carrol from Alice in Wonderland

Quake III

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Quake III - High Quality

Notes

The Quake scores are pretty much identical between the boards.

SIDEBAR: If I said anything which implies that I think that we didn't do what we should have done given the choices we faced at the time, I shouldn't have said that.

- Bill Clinton

Wolfenstein

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Return To Castle Wolfenstein MP Test

Notes

The scores here are pretty close, with the A7N sticking with the pack.


SIDEBAR: "When women are depressed, they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It's a whole different way of thinking."

- Elaine Boosler

ZD Tests

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Notes

Once again the nForce doesn’t quite beat everything out there, but it sure isn’t lagging behind here.


SIDEBAR: "The science of Psychiatry is now where the science of Medicine was before germs were discovered."

- Malcolm Rogers

Ballistics Report

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Pros

Performance: Looking at this board from performance perspective, we’re going to have to say that we like what we see. It goes toe to toe with the KT266A and comes out slugging. The graphs basically show no clear victor. For NVIDIA’s first foray into the motherboard chipset business, they slammed a homer.

Price: At $160, the price may seem a little bit higher than other boards, but considering what you get, we’re inclined to swallow the extra $20. The onboard sound easily rivals a SB Live!, and the onboard network controller saves a few more bucks. For those of you out there that want a quick and easy to setup system, this is almost impossible to beat.

Setup Did we mention setup speed? Following OS installation all you do is install one driver and you’re good to go. It’s almost impossible to screw up the software install process for this board.

Cons

Fan connectors We were a little disappointed by the lack of fan headers. Aside from the CPU fan connector, there was only one extra header. While many fans do connect the power supply cables, it never hurts to have a few onboard options.

Some toys
The A7N is missing some key new toys. Stuff like USB 2.0 and ATA133 are missing, as well as a RAID chip. Many of you out there won’t miss this stuff, but we’re sure there are a few out there that want all the goodies.

Another little tidbit, despite the inclusion of six USB ports, you can only utilize four of the ports, for the last two you will have to buy another connector. This is an odd move on the part of ASUS, but we can see why, there aren’t too many people who actually utilize all six ports at the same time. And since it is USB, you can unplug a device and attach something else without any adverse affects.

RAM
While this isn’t a shortcoming because of ASUS, we have to mention it. If you do go out and buy yourself an nForce-based board, make sure to check what RAM you buy, and how much you buy. Buying the wrong memory, and the amount could leave you with decreased performance and/or an unstable system. This is one setup where you cannot drop any three sticks of RAM in, take heed.

SIDEBAR: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

- Mark Twain

Final Verdict

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