Worth looking into but not for beginners
Written: Mar 06 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Hot and fast... Seems High Quality
Cons: Poor Support, Outdated drivers w/mb Jan 1.2003
The Bottom Line: A good choice but not for your first home built experience!
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| blake2415's Full Review: ASUS NVIDIA nForce Chipset A7N266-VM (A7N266-VM W/... |
Nvidia puts it all together in this GForce Chipset. I was very amazed with the overall performance from such an inexpensive board. I look forward to a whole generation of new systems based on this chipset.
The pros are numerous, so I'll concentrate only on the negatives...
The first is I couldn't get the internal network port to connect. I can't blame the board, as I've had this same problem with other boards. It accepted a Netgear FA311 card and for whatever reason, this card always seems to work no matter what. I could have a network wiring problem but I've been unable to prove this. I understand the FA311 can reconfigure itself for bad wiring.
The second, after a motherboard replacement from an ECS unit to this Asus, windows ME became very "sick" and unstable. A reinstall make it better, but still unstable. The driver disk that came with the board was very lacking and Asus has spent little time in providing drivers and support for this board.
After many failed attempts to get this system to run correctly, I checked Nvidia's web site and downloaded the Gforce chipset drivers there and this seemed to do the trick. This board is hot and fast. The only strangeness is that when windows ME boots, the login sound plays but is broken-up, much like the problems back when systems were only 100 mhz. Otherwise, after boot up, this board runs fast and seems stable. It keeps up with my higher speed athlon system and makes windows me seem as fast as XP.
I recommend this board to anyone that has the guts to work through the Asus shortcomings with regard to support and posted drivers. You'll need to plan on getting the drivers from Nvidia and you'll need to plan to get your system stable with the inital install of the system. Maybe my board was from old stock, and maybe they have a new driver disk already, but I wouldn't bank on it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 75.00
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Epinions.com ID:
blake2415
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Reviews written: 9
Trusted by: 1 member
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