Asus A7266-VM 220-D Anygood ?

[b5fan]

hi,
Im thinking getting one of these instead of my motherboard at moment and ive read reviews and they are better and faster then the board ive got at moment.

Reason ive thinking getting one is im on a tight budget and i can get one for about £50 new from a local computer shop.

Other motherboards i like are £70 to £80 or ive got to order them online and make price about £65 with postage and packing.

Ive got a athlon xp 1700 and fortissmo 2 soundcard.

Is the sound as good as ive read better then the fortissmo 2 and even as good or slightly better then the Audigy soundcard ?

Board ive got at moment is a K7S5A and got 256mb DDR memory PC2100.

[b5fan]

hi,
Brought 1 and installed and what can i say besides BRILL :)

reinstalled winxp and installed the latest nforce drivers from nvidia and ran quake 3 timedemo1

800 x 600 16bit colour 191fps :eek:

compared to 175fps with my old ECS K7S5A

3dmark 2001 7198 :)
compared to 6984

That was with
Athlon XP 1700
256mb DDR PC2100
Onboard sound

Unreal 2 plays better and slightly smoother and slightly faster :)
(still need another 256mb ram for it to run smooth)

[Dazz]

Yeah and it's still got digital sound too :) it's compariable to the Audigy in performance but lacks some of the 3D audio features like EAX3.0, i think it supports 2.0? Anyway which place is selling it for £50 pick up i might get one :)

[b5fan]

hi,
I brought mine from www.gladiatorcomputers.co.uk
it was £54.53 including VAT :)

so far its been great , put my fortissmo 2 soundcard in just for a whirl and ran quake 3 i got 188fps to 189fps compared to nforce sound of 189fps to 191fps in timedemo 1 :)

So back with the nforce sound now :)

Played unreal 2 and it works great no performance lose with EAX sounds enabled :)

[erwos]

My family picked up a couple of these to do upgrades on older machines. No complaints so far.

Performance is pretty good, but I don't have any other motherboards to compare it against, so my opinion is pretty worthless. The on-board video runs DX6 and DX7 games (Serious Sam, Quake3, etc) at a pretty good clip if you turn the resolution and color depth down, so it's certainly usable if you're just a casual gamer.

One thing to consider is that they don't have USB2 or Firewire onboard, so you'll be wasting a PCI slot or two if you need those capabilities. It's also using the nForce220D chipset, so you don't get the dual-channel memory controller, but you do get SoundStorm support.

In other words, a good buy if you want to give a family member a great price-performance ratio computer. Bad if you have very specific needs, though.

-Erwos

[Dazz]

I am thinking of the ABIT NF7-S 1.2 board for £90 but i have heard ALOT of problems with them :(

[Tempest]

I fell in love with this board when I read the review and details of it, being as I am a poor sod, I cannot get one for myself at the moment, but I have built 2 pcs with this board for some mates and it works perfectly.

What I would like to know is has someone installed Mandrake9.1 on it as I have been asked to price up a complete network and about 5 systems for a small office, but I don't realy want to be stuck with a Windows only setup as that will bump the price up.