The setbacks of AMD-760

While AMD's 760 chipset offers excellent performance, it does have its fair share of shortcomings. Its primary limitation is cost, AMD-760 motherboards are expensive to implement. This drawback was cast into the limelight at the end of last year when Gigabyte and Micron released AMD-760 based systems that only supported 200MHz bus speeds.

Due to increased noise levels at 266MHz, the 760 chipset may generate a clock glitch in CPU, causing the system to hang. We highlighted this quandary back in November of last year in our AMD-760 Delay? article. To resolve this problem, motherboard manufacturers had to implement an additional filter to ensure proper operation, increasing costs on the already expensive 760 chipset.

Complicating matters is the limited feature set of the AMD-760 chipset. Early specifications for AMD-760 limited motherboards to just two DIMM sockets (which also happens to be overvolted to 2.65V for proper AGP 4X operation), only recently have 760 motherboards with additional DIMM sockets become available. In addition, the memory controller in the AMD-761 North Bridge only supports DDR SDRAM, rendering today's PC133 SDRAM obsolete. While DDR has come a long way in terms of price and availability since the AMD-760 chipset was first released last year, many budget-minded consumers would prefer to stick it out with SDR SDRAM a little longer.

Finding the perfect solution

With these factors in mind, motherboard manufacturers have been slow to adopt the AMD-760 chipset. With alternative chipsets from ALi, VIA, and soon SiS, offering more features than AMD-760 at a lower cost, it isn't hard to see the situation from a motherboard manufacturers perspective: why spend the money to develop, market, and then provide support for an expensive platform that even AMD isn't fully committed to? That's where ALi's MAGiK 1 chipset and specifically, the ASUS A7A266 come in.

To ease the transition from SDR SDRAM to DDR SDRAM, the A7A266 sports 184-pin DIMM sockets for DDR SDRAM, and 168-pin sockets for conventional SDRAM. From ASUS's perspective, this feature alone will sell a lot of boards as it provides the best of both worlds' for both the retail and OEM segments.

Keep in mind that while the A7A266 provides both DIMM sockets, end users can't mix DDR memory with SDR. Only one or the other can be installed in the system at any given time.

In comparison to the AMD-760 based ASUS A7M266, the A7A266 also supports two additional USB devices, bringing total support to up to six USB devices. Here's a brief rundown of the A7A266's other key features:

As a result of its more compelling feature set and attractive price, the A7A266 has replaced the A7M266 as ASUS's primary Socket A motherboard for performance segment in the US market. But does it live up to its predecessor?

The MAGiK 1 chipset doesn't need a fan to run cool

The C-Media audio chip is located to the left of the second PCI slot

Features
ALi MAGiK 1 chipset
FSB @ 200/266MHz
1.5V ~ 1.85V 16 scales CPU voltage setting
Supports PC100/133 SDRAM
2 x DDR DIMM sockets
3 x SDRAM DIMM sockets
C-Media CMI-8738 PCI audio controller w/ 4-Channel Speaker Mode
1 AGP/5 PCI/1 AMR Configuration
2 x UltraDMA/100