Hardly has a year passed since nForce 220D chipset announcement, as it appeared in mainboards :) We have already discussed what caused such a late coming of this solution (see this news story) that is why we will not repeat the whole story here. As we had supposed, the first manufacturer ready to start mass production of nForce 220D based solutions appeared ASUS, which launched its new A7N266-VM solution, as we read over here.

Its specs are pretty standard for boards based on this chipset. It is designed in MicroATX form-factor, supports Socket A processors, features 2 DIMM slots for PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM (doesn’t support TwinBank architecture, i.e. features 64bit memory bus). Besides, there are 3 PCI slots, an AGP 4x slot, integrated graphics core, a CNR slot, ATA/100 and Dolby Digital Surround sound (supported by the chipset), integrated Ethernet 10/100 controller from Realtek.

In general, this is an ordinary mainboard for a standard office PC. The only question that matters is its price. I suppose that independent of the manufacturer’s brand name, the boards of the kind should fit into the "below $100" category. Hopefully, it will be the case for ASUS A7N266-VM.

If you are looking for the details on the nForce 200D performance, please consult our review (Part I and Part II).