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Today we'll be
reviewing the latest in a long line of KT266A motherboards
to move through the H.H. labs, the Acorp 7KT266A.
Although some of you may not have heard of them, Acorp has
been around for a number of years and remains one of
Taiwan's top manufacturers of computer hardware components.
The 7KT266A is one of the newest additions to a well
established line of motherboards. With the praise that
the KT266A has garnered over the past few months by
reviewers and users around the world, it is no surprise that
Acorp made it their chipset of choice for their new Athlon
based motherboards. With a history of high-performance
and stability, it must have been an easy decision.
So let's get things started by
taking a look at what the 7KT266A has to offer.
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| Specifications of the
Acorp 7KT266A Motherboard |
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Not all motherboards
are created equal... |
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CPU
AMD Socket A Athlon XP
Duron
Processor
Chipset
VIA KT266A+8233
FSB
200/266 MHz
Form Factor
ATX
System Memory
DDR x 3
Audio
AC`97 Sound
AGP
AGP4X
IDE
Ultra DMA 66/100
Hardware Monitor
Built-in
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Expansion Slot
PCI x 5
ACR x 1
AGP x 1
Intelligent Wake Up
Wake on LAN
Wake on Modem
Wake on Alarm
I/O Support
USB x 6
Floppy x 1
Serial port x 2
Parallel port x 1
IR x1
Special Functions
Smart Panel II support
Over Clock
Over Voltage
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Below is a list of items that are included with
7KT266A motherboard: 1 - Drivers
CD including Norton Anti- Virus 2001,
Norton Ghost, AutoSave, eWalla, WinDVD, Acrobat
Reader 4.05, Online Manual.
1 - Users Guide
1 - ATA 100 IDE cable
1 - Floppy cable
1 - Pocket calculator
1 - Fuzzy Sun Flower
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The first impression that we got with this package is we sure wish they
would've saved the money spent on the calculator and Fuzzy Sun Flower and
provided the user with more useful items. One of the biggest gripes we
are constantly pointing out is that so many board
manufacturers offer the ability to add additional USB ports to their product
yet they don't provide the user with the hardware to take advantage of it.
With the removal of gimmicks and the possible addition of a dollar or two to
the overall cost of the board, Acorp could've included this hardware and
they would win users over with their quality and useful extras all the same.
The Drivers CD had a clear and easy to use
menu which displayed the entire contents of the disk. At
first the CD appeared to have an excellent selection of
useful products, however we did find a few problems, the first
being that WinDVD was, in
fact, not on the CD. We also found two other
applications that would not function with our test system, AutoSave
and Via Hardware Monitor which gave a message that it "can't
be initialized by the BIOS." Aside from that, users should get good use out of
the Norton products, I am particularly fond of Norton Ghost
which has performed exceptionally well, especially with RAID-0
configurations.
Now that we've seen what comes with the 7KT266A,
let's move on to the physical quality of the motherboard.
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Quality,
Setup and the BIOS
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