by Anton Shilov
12/05/2002 | 07:46 AM
ASUSTeK Computer announced that their A7N266-VM/AA micro-ATX mainboard has met the AMD Assured Program requirements. This fact proves that the product is fully compliant with AMD processors as well as other hardware and software, works stably and does not have any design issues.
AMD Assured mainboards should comply with Microsoft's System and Device Requirements 2.0, incorporate the essential management elements of Wired for Management 2.0, and provide an interoperable solution in any networked environment. AMD wants hardware monitoring and CPU protection systems to be installed on the assured device. In addition, the AMD Assured Program requires mainboards remain available in the market for at least 12 months.<%BANNER[article]%>
The AMD Assured Program is designed to help identify AMD processor-based motherboards that provide stability and long-term availability, enable planned technology transitions, and offer manageable platforms for use in commercial desktop systems. AMD Assured motherboards have passed AMD’s stringent manageability and validation tests, and are available for use in commercial offerings. On the other hand, AMD wants to validate only mature mainboards under their program and the products should be available for one year without any modifications and revisions after the validation. One year is more than a lifetime of an ordinary mainboard, after a year the mainboard will not be bought either with “AMD Assured” logotype or without it in retails. Therefore, the program is mostly useful for system integrators, who sell their mainboards to commercial users, who are not so interested in getting the newest and most powerful system possible, but wish to owe a reliable one.
At the moment there are only two mainboards that are assured by AMD (have a look here, at AMD’s web-site): ASUS A7N266-VM/AA and ASUS A7V266-E/AA. The former is based on the nForce220D, the latter is powered by VIA KT266A. Both does not support AMD processors with 333MHz FSB, USB 2.0 and AGP 8x. Basically, these mainboards are almost ideal solutions for office PCs: graphics core and sound-core (even with Dolby-Digital support) are integrated while stability and reliability are guaranteed by AMD.
I wonder how long NVIDIA will keep supplying ASUSTeK with its rather old nForce220 chipset? By the way, VIA was going to cease suppluing its KT266A some time ago.