Asus A7A266

THE BAD:
heating

SUMMARY:
i bought this mobo cause the alimagic chipset sounded sexy and also it could support ddr and sdr!

Soon as i put my AMD 1.33 thunderbird cpu, after 10 min, it kept crashing! when run the cpu at 1ghz it problem seem to stop! but still now a then again crashes. so i bought aliminium case and bought the most powerful cpu fan and put my cpu back to 1.33 but it still keeps crashing after 10 min!

ive had this mobo for 1 and half year.. just dont have the money to get another mobo for the mean time!

THE BAD:
Was'nt finished when I bought it.

SUMMARY:
So out of the box this board tanked... It took two bios updates just to get it to the point where it would boot win2k.
After that.. heat.
It would over heat and shut off.
ok..

So a little arctic silver on the heatsink and ..

I've been using it ever since as a fairly stable gaming machine. Yea, It locks up maybe once a week, but I expect that from a system that has a gillion games installed on it at one time.
Over all, I'd say its an ok board. I blame not Asus for this disaster, I blame Acer Labs..the company that makes the Ali Magik chip set.
If you see ali(Acer Labs Inc) on the box.. dont buy it.
Acer Blows.

SUMMARY:
First problem I had was that it kept on freezing because the bios wasn't flashed and it didn't support Samsung DDR Ram. Second, the IDE controllers were kinda messed and I had a lot of problems when I hooked up four devices to it. Third, the IDE controller is so messed up that I can't even re-install Windows 2000 properly. I just formatted for the 3rd time and it won't properly install the god damn operating system. It always messes up. I don't know how this motherboard lasted me a year but I'm going out tomorrow to buy a new motherboard. This mobo is the king of the sh*ttiest mobos out there.

SUMMARY:
First problem I had was that it kept on freezing because the bios wasn't flashed and it didn't support Samsung DDR Ram. Second, the IDE controllers were kinda messed and I had a lot of problems when I hooked up four devices to it. Third, the IDE controller is so messed up that I can't even re-install Windows 2000 properly. I just formatted for the 3rd time and it won't properly install the god damn operating system. It always messes up. I don't know how this motherboard lasted me a year but I'm going out tomorrow to buy a new motherboard. This mobo is the king of the sh*ttiest mobos out there.

THE BAD:
that it was a client who suffered it

SUMMARY:
some months ago I built the best machine I could for a research group (of course on a budget and living in Argentina)...
1giga ddr ram... Amd palomino 1.6+... this infamous A7A266.
I've never been called so frequently for complaints... "the machine did not start", (I agree with 1 every 10 times), you had to fully umplug the thing, and even that sometimes did not work. It also took a time to make it stable. It just used to freeze...with no big deal of temperature. We even moved to win nt 4!!! were we found the best results.
Nowadays, it does not recognize any keyboard, and looking around for a solution I found this webpage...well, I hope no one else falls in this expensive trap called asus a7a266. (sorry for the english)

THE BAD:
Must have payed about $140 for it at the time (7 months or so ago), now it aint worth $50.
The board would just completely lock up at some times.
The settings with the multipliers (look at the pick, notice the little blue box with a 1 2 3 and 4 on it) would get all messed up, and I had to kill the power a few times just to make the board not remember the old setting.
Seriously too many to list, as you can see from the previous reviews, this board aint worth jack.

SUMMARY:
When I first got this board, I was happy to see that I had an ASUS. Then the problems started happening - the right sound channel wouldn't work - only the left one would. I know this is a known problem with this board because I have seen other sites with reviews about this board and some of them said they had the same problem with sound channels. I had constant problems with the power, sometimes the power wouldn't even turn on and I had to switch the multipliers just to make it boot to the bios, it has a really bad way of remembering the multiplier settings. The board would lock up every once in a while, which would screw over the settings completely. Damn did I have so many problems, I thought hey, this board should kill the competition, its an ASUS - but wow, did it ever suck so bad. It has HELLISHITTY IRQ problems, sometimes when I would check my mail or do certain things (not OS specific), hardware faults would happen with the A7A266 and i'd have to reboot (couldn't save work or anything). Too many problems to discuss, I can't believe I was so foolish to buy such a POS motherboard. Finally, what is making me switch now - the A7A266 doesn't seem to like the newer graphics cards (or at least in my experiences) like the GeForce 4 Ti 4200's, and it sent some signal into my powersupply, overloaded it and blew out the power supply, and burnt a chip on my motherboard, rendering it useless. I just went and bought an ABIT KG7 motherboard and a new powersupply - waiting for those to arrive, will be alot better than this joke of a motherboard A7A266. Take my advice, don't get this motherboard. And if you think that I don't know anything about computers and did it all wrong, which was why the board didn't like me - think again, that is NOT the case here.

Don't get this motherboard.

Eric Smith
Syntech Software
http://www.syntechsoftware.com/ | mail[AT]syntechsoftware.com

THE BAD:
- Slow
- Dosnt Last
- Freezes for no reason
- Just likes to die every once and awhile
- way too many to list, id have u all reading for hours

SUMMARY:
All i can say is this mobo is a POS. After 2 months of having it, 1 of the capaciters poped and the mobo is dead. Not only that, before the cap poped it randomly took a $hit and just froze for no apparent reason. Tried running slackware linux on it, no go, kernel panics right on boot up from the cd. If anybody is looking at buying this motherboard, i wouldnt recommend it, turn away while u can and get urself a A7V333, which i currently have and love.

THE BAD:
Too much to say here. I actually have two of these boards. One of them worked for about 2 days and took a crap. The other is 6 months old and has finally bit the dust. Both had major bios problems right out of the box. The original one would cycle the time(very weird). It also would not load an operating system. Not even DOS. The one that is 6 months old will load linux but will not load windows 98, 2000 or XP. Ive tried all three. BTW linux loads but thats about it. It also burned up a 1.2 athlon.

SUMMARY:
I really dont know how Asus got away with highway robbery. I ve tried talking to Asus about this and they told me to contact the reseller. After that i cant get a response out of them. These boards are slow, unstable, and run extremely hot for there speed. Please dont bother with this board or any other board from Asus. There customer service sucks.

THE BAD:
Too much to list here....

SUMMARY:
Stay away from this board.... It simply is aweful! I've had it for about 6 months, and only got problems with it!!!! The good is that once it is started, it's pretty stable and relatively fast.
The bad, it won't start 9 out of 10 times, the Asus Probe software is shit, and today, it just died on me.... actually, it still works but my keyboard isn't recognized!!!!! I've tried everything to get it back alive, but I'll think I'll move on to a VIA KT266A board... NOT FROM ASUS... Their Tech support don't even speak english properly, they have no clue, and you'll have to try 100 times before getting in touch with them!!!!
FYI, I'm running an overclocked 1.33, watercooled, with 256PC133 60G HD, Radeon 32MB DDR, DVD, CDR.... and WinXP... I just installed the OS last week... looks like the mobo didn't take the upgrade too well!!!!
Anyways, the board simply sux, as much as Asus Tech support!!!!
Don't waste your money in this board, get something cheaper and nicer!!!!!