The new year came and, as we have promised, DDR mainboards started selling all over the world. First ASUS A7M266 mainboard built on AMD-760 appeared in Germany, as we have already reported a couple of days ago, and now it is selling also in France. In particular, here you can buy ASUS A7M266 for $273 (by the way, it is $30 more expensive than in Germany).
Moreover, ASUS A7M266 also appeared in Japan. However, in the country of the Rising Sun this board costs the least of all: from $187 to $221. As a result, we have every right to call A7M266 the first fully fledged mainboard based on AMD-760 chipset supporting 266MHz FSB to appear in retail stores. You may wonder about Gigabyte GA-7DXC, which started selling last year already, however, it supported only 200MHz FSB and PC1600 DDR SDRAM.
Taking into account that ASUS A7M266 is spreading all over the world so fast, you may hope to see it at your next-door store pretty soon as well.
And waiting for the board is really worth it. A7M266 features 2 184-pin DIMM slots for PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM, integrated 6-channel CMI-8738 sound controller, AGP Pro slot, 5 PCI and 1 AMR slot. For the South Bridge ASUS selected VIA 686B supporting ATA/100. But the most important thing about this product is rich overclocking opportunities it offers. Besides changing the CPU clock frequency multiplier, you will be able to set the FSB frequency between 95 and 166MHz with 1MHz increments, Vio and Vcore. All this can be done via BIOS Setup due to ASUS brand JumperFree technology as well as with the regular dip-switches.
Besides, there is one more mainboard, which has recently appeared in Japanese hardware stores. This is a new mainboard from Transcend based on ALi MAGiK 1 chipset: TS-ALR4. There are 3 DDR DIMM slots, AGP 4x slot and 6 PCI slots. However, it costs not that little: $230.