Motherboard: Asus A7V266-E :: Installation

I had a few problems getting the motherboard up and going but those problems turned out to be power supply related and nothing to do with the motherboard itself. The motherboard offers adequate space around the CPU for using larger sized cooling solutions(FIGURE 3) such as the now defunct Taisol solution that is much larger that the average heatsink available on the market.

Figure 3

There are two jumpers on the motherboard for overclocking the motherboard manually. I did not use these, as I prefer the SOFTMENU 3 that is part of the Award BIOS. There are many options available to the overclocker in this section of the BIOS such as accurate 1MHz adjustments of the system-bus-frequency and flexible CPU Core Voltage Adjustments in 0.05V increments that help in getting the maximum performance out of your AMD CPU.

In the BIOS I made a few changes such as RAM CAS delay time and CPU support. The Asus K7V266-E offers the user onboard support for the Palomino (MP) processors as a settings option in the BIOS itself. The CPU did not auto detect on the first boot up so I had to alter the settings in the BIOS to have it recognized as a 1800+ MP CPU, which it did after a few settings were altered and the system restarted.

The boards RAM slots are not picky and the motherboard will post when a single chip of memory is used in any slot so that is not a concern here. I was able to get this entire setup done in less than fifteen minutes so anyone should be able to work with this motherboard with relative ease. A good beginner's board but not great as the BIOS does need to be adjusted for optimal performance. This is something that can be a daunting thing for the newcomer.

Windows XP installation went off without any problems, as did the drivers off the Asus CD. I got the latest VIA chipset drivers from their website as well as the Nvidia site for their latest display drivers. After a couple of restarts I installed the testing programs and began to do the testing. The results of these tests can be seen in the board's performance section of this review and the K7V266-E did not fare to badly. Read on and see for yourself.

Stability and Torture Testing

For our stability and torture testing we use two industry recognized programs that put the system through a variety of tests to insure stability. One is Checkit7.0 Pro a DOS based series of tests for checking the functionality of the motherboards various system interfaces and parts. These tests provide accurate results for reporting system hardware problems.

The other main test we use for stability is Prime95 torture a Windows based test that runs the computer through a series of mathematical calculation tests based on finding Prime numbers. This test is known to make systems crash if they are unstable and has brought many so-called stable systems to a halt. I ran the torture test for over 24 hours without having any problems encountered during the testing period. This was a very stable motherboard that ran without error.