ASUS Puts Out Two New nForce Motherboards

I find it interesting that a motherboard with built-in graphics and sound would raise such a stir. Many of us like the option of yanking out the graphics and sound cards whenever the next big thing comes along. The anticipation of nForce motherboards is causing some noise, however, amongst the THG faithful. If nForce is what you're waiting for, ASUS just released two new motherboards that use NVIDIA's much-ballyhooed chipset. The A7N266 series features GeForce2 level 3D graphics, 5.1 audio and integrated LAN. Available models include A7N266-E with Dolby 5.1 audio and the A7N266 with onboard C-media 6-channel audio. The A7N266 series features a 128-bit TwinBank DDR memory architecture, Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Pre-processor (DASP) to boost CPU performance, and HyperTransport. The graphics core is the same as the one found on the GeForce2 AGP graphics cards, and ASUS says that graphics processing upgrades can be accomplished through the AGP Pro slot.

The A7N266-E features the NVIDIA MCP-D APU (audio processing unit) and an ASUS 6-channel ACR audio module, for Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and S/PDIF-out connectivity. It also features an onboard Dolby Digital 5.1encoder and support for DirectX 8.0. The A7N266 is basically the same board as the A7N266-E, with the exception of the audio. The A7N266 includes C-media 8738 6-channel hardware audio along with SPDIF-in/out. The A7N266 series also includes a game bundle with Interplay's Star Trek New Worlds and Messiah. Bundled utilities include Trend Micro's PC-cillin 2000 anti-virus software, ASUS Probe system health monitoring software, and Cyberlink PowerPlayer SE.

The full feature list of the A7N266-E includes support for socket A AMD Duron, Athlon, and Athlon XP processors, NVIDIA nForce 420D chipset with an NVIDIA IGP-128 north bridge and NVIDIA MCP-D south bridge, 200/266MHz front-side-bus, integrated NVIDIA GeForce2 graphics core, 3 DIMM slots and up to 1.5GB of PC2100/1600 non ECC DDR memory support, 128-bit TwinBank memory architecture for up to 4.2GB/s bandwidth, integrated APU (audio processing unit) with Dolby Digital audio, ASUS 6-channel ACR audio module with SPDIF-out interface, Realtek RTL 8139 10/100 Mbps LAN controller, 5 PCI slots, 2 USB ports, and 1 AGP Pro slot, and 1 ACR slot, all stuffed into an ATX form factor. The ASUS A7N266 series will be shipping this month.