As we learned from our sources close to ASUS, the company is still planning to start shipping its A7S-VM mainboard on SiS-730 in the middle of March. We have already told you about this product in December, so see our archive for details. According to ASUS reps, they could have started shipping much earlier if it were not for SiS, which failed to provide stable supplies of its chipset. Now SiS seems to have solved these problems.
A7S-VM is a Micro-ATX mainboard equipped with 2 DIMM slots for up to 1GB PC100/PC133 SDRAM. It supports ATA/100, features onboard sound, onboard network controller, onboard graphics and doesn’t allow using any add-in graphics cards, i.e. doesn’t have an AGP slot. In other words, it has everything a low-cost mainboard may need to build up a low-cost office system. We would call it a special board for Duron processor, actually.
In fact, everything could be just excellent if it were not for the recommended price of this board: around $123. Isn’t it too much for a product of i810E2-type?
Well, we have to repeat once again: no wonder that Duron processors aren’t that popular yet...