Just Installed the Asus A7N266 - Wow!

[Jerry Jones]

I love this motherboard!

I installed a brand new Asus A7N266 over the weekend to use with my older AMD Athlon 1.4gHz Thunderbird processor.

It features the new NVIDIA chipset and very decent quality integrated graphics and sound.

This motherboard runs the 1.4 T-Bird at 266mhz very nicely.

The manual is very nicely detailed and the driver installation disk was a breeze to use... much easier to use than cheaper mobos I've installed.

By the way, I must've gotten a bad apple from ECS; I earlier had installed their K7AMA with the ALi MAGiK chipset. At first, I thought it was going to work... $47 well spent... but - alas - it failed catastrophically on Saturday. Oh well, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and I lost on that one.

The K7S5A would seem to be the better board - but some earlier versions - Rev. 4 - are known to have issues with the Athlon Thunderbird 1.4s, namely, they won't support 266mhz bus speeds with any degree of stability.

XP Athlons seem to work beautifully in that one, however.

While ECS K7S5A is functioning ok with my XP2000+, I'm going to replace it with another A7N266 because I just love the way this motherboard performs.

This Asus board just 'feels' great... very responsive... rock solid stability so far.

The integrated audio sounds much nicer than the integrated audio of the K7S5A, too.

I also suspect the NVIDIA chipset is considerably faster and than the SIS 735...

I'll be running the Stetler .DVP MediaStudio Pro test file later this week to compare speed.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[GNEP]

I am still running the ECS K7AMA - generally stable but obviously budget.

It still refuses to recognise the 1.4 T'bird as anything other than 1.15 GHz (!?!?!) when on a 100 FSB - the multiplier is 11.5, which
shoves the CPU too high when I try changing to a 133 FSB (1.53GHz).

Hmmmm....

gnep

[KuroNeko]

The Inquirer (or was it C'T) reported that Nvidia chipsets have issues with PCI throughput (very slow).

What speed do you get?

Neko

[wkulecz]

Its generally latency that causes problems in video editing. Some Via chipsets seem to get very good thruput numbers, but introduce infrequent latencies that cause glitches in DV out (which only needs ~3.6MByte/sec thruput).

I think a PCI thruput figure that doesn't also give worst case latency is pretty worthless as a basis for making a buying decision for any real-time or near real-time software applications (like video editing).

--wally.

[Jerry Jones]

I agree with Wally.

Here's an interesting Web page about Via chipsets and a PCI latency "patch" that one person has devised:

http://www.networking.tzo.com/net/software/readme/vlatency_v014_readme.htm

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

By the way, I'll be testing my new NVIDIA chipset board using the Terry Stetler test file:

http://www.hyperactivemusic.com/MS%20Pro%206.0.htm

I plan to run the test tonight.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[KuroNeko]

The latest C't mainboard tests of P4 and Athlon mainboards have remarks in them that say the latest VIA chipsets are superb and even beat the Intel chipsets on PCI and memory performance, which used to be VIA's achillesheel.

Can't find the article anymore where the Nvidia bug was explained, will keep looking

Neko

[Jerry Jones]

All I *know* is what I'm experiencing personally Neko.

And my experience is turning out to be very positive with the Asus A7N266.

Here are some interesting new numbers I've sent to Mark for the MediaStudio Pro render speed Web page.

The NVIDIA chipset seems to be significantly faster than the SIS 735.

I installed my older AMD Athlon 1.4ghz processor on a new ASUS A7N266 motherboard.

I downloaded the newest test file just to be certain I didn't make the same mistake I did the last time.

The stats:

TIME FOR AVI CREATION: 6:10

TIME FOR MPEG-2 ENCODE: 7:22

PROCESSOR TYPE AND SPEED:

AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4ghz processor

PROGRAM USED:

MediaStudio Pro 6.5

MEMORY TYPE:

PC2100 DDR (1 gigabyte)

CHIPSET: Nvidia NForce

One thing I never saw in the BIOS of the Elite Group K7S5A was the option to change multiplier settings.

With my NVIDIA board, I'm using the 10.5 multiplier.

But here's how my results differ between the two boards:

A7N266:

AVI Creation: 6:10 MPEG-2 Creation: 7:22

K7S5A:

AVI Creation: 7:20 MPEG-2 Creation: 8:29

At work, my Dell Dimension 8100 uses an Intel Pentium 4 1.7ghz processor with an Intel 850 chipset and Rambus memory.

Intel 850 with 1.7 P4:

AVI Creation: 5:54 MPEG-2 Creation: 8:12

I'm going to replace my K7S5A in a couple of months with a second ASUS A7N266 and I'll do the test again with my AMD Athlon XP2000+ processor.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

By the way, Wally mentioned something significant about PCI LATENCY.

The manual for the ASUS A7N266 says to set the PCI LATENCY in the BIOS to 32.

In my initial tests with this board, that setting didn't work; it caused DV captures to exhibit occasional glitches.

Having seen this phenomenon before, I set the PCI LATENCY to 64 and the resulting captures were PERFECT using my OHCI compliant ATI DV Wonder board.

This topic was hashed over and over again on the Canopus DV Raptor board two years ago.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net