I recently purchased an ASUS A7M266-M mainboard: It was build by ASUS for HP, so it's a little strange.

• Updates
• HP OEM BIOS
• Undocumented Jumpers
• USB Header Pinout
• Undocumented Drivers

General Info

The board is Micro-ATX form factor, the drive connectors are placed in the front of the board. The CPU sits a little farther forward than most other Micro-ATX boards, this could affect cooling in small cases, this is done to allow room for the VRM board behind the CPU. The northbridge is passively cooled, the board doesn't have any options for overclocking so this is fine (don't have to worry about fan failure) it seems to run cool. The backplane is standard, except there is not VGA/COM2 connector and it includes the RJ-45 jack above the USB (standard on most new cases). One of the strangest features of the board is the connector on the bottom edge of the board next to PCI slot 3: there is a connecter physicly identical to an AGP 2X card, but it is for an expansion board used by HP in full ATX case it adds 2 PCI and 1 ISA slots.

Updates

• [03-31-04] Added images
• [02-17-04] Spellchecked page :)
• [02-16-04] Received email the XP2400 works w/ BIOS v3.34. (CPU recognized as Athlon 2000MHz)
• A bit of bad news: the AMD 761 northbridge seems to have a common flaw. In which it starts corrupting the memory contents, I have seen it on three boards so far the feature the chipset. If you are having random lockups, download MemTest86 make the floppy or CD, boot off it let it run over night, if there are errors swap the memory and try again, if you keep having errors its likely that your board has befallen the same fate.
• My board has unfortunately reach the end of its life, as a result I will not be updating this page anymore (with the possible exception of posting some pictures), I may more may not answer email, seem to get a fair number of them.
• Tested w/ Athlon XP2200 works w/ BIOS v3.33.
• Testing w/ Athlon XP1800 works w/ BIOS v3.33.
• Reports of trouble with XP2100 and higher.
• The board does _NOT_ support Registered ECC RAM! The AMD761 does but the mainboard's support is broken or lacking.

BIOS

When I got the board it had a HP OEM Phoenix BIOS v. 2.03: this BIOS didn't support the Athlon XP (Palimino) or Duron 1GHz+ (Morgan) CPUs properly. First I tried swapping BIOS chips with my A7M266, this did not work. Do not flash this board with the ASUS A7M266 BIOS, it will not boot! Then I poked around of HP's website and found a new BIOS release v. 3.33 (March 2002), this fixed the incompatibilities with the new AMD CPUs. You can find the link to in in the files section.

Jumpers

There is only one jumper on the board, it controls the front side bus (100MHz for Durons and most TBirds, 133MHz for Athlon XPs). It located in front of the floppy connector next to the clock controller.

USB Header

I was confused by the USB header (located on the bottom edge of the board) at first. On the back of the board I found the grounds then I used a power LED to find the VCC pins, and then test with a USB mouse.

          +--+
Ground    |..|    Ground
VCC       |..|    VCC
          |  |
-Data1    |..|    -Data2
+Data1    |..|    +Data2
Ground    |..|    Ground
          +--+

I got an email for this one: front panel connector:

            +--+
Power SW    |. |
Power SW    |. |
HDD LED +   |. |
HDD LED -   |. |
            |  |
Power LED - |. |
Power LED + |. |
Power LED + |. |
            |  |
            |  |
            +--+

Drivers

Ok, drivers are pretty easy. I made the mistake of misidentifying the AC97 codec and had driver issues. Here is a basic driver load order (Under Windows 2000 should be the same for other versions):

1. AMD AGP miniport driver
2. VIA 4in1 drivers
3. Video driver
4. Realtek network driver
5. Crystal CS4299 driver
6. other drivers

Conclusion

The board is a solid little Athlon board, haven't had any problems with it since I figured it out. It's not an overclockers board, but still high performance. It has a full Micro-ATX slot count plus, onboard audio and NIC. The audio doesn't pop when you turn it on, unlike many other AC97 codecs. The NIC is fine for most uses, just wouldn't run it as a network file server, but who was going to use a Micro-ATX board in their server? And best of all it has an AMD 761 chipset so it is stable, and isn't plagued with onboard video. I would recommend it for anyone looking for a Micro-ATX mainboard that was willing to spend the extra for a good video card.

Files

Here are the places you can find files I found useful in setting up the board:

• BIOS v. 3.33
• AMD Chipset Drivers (just grab the miniport driver for your OS)
• VIA 4in1 Drivers
• Crystal CS4299 Drivers (Crystal is now Cirrus Logic?!?)
• nVidia Detonator Drivers for those of you running an nVidia card :)
• RealTek Drivers just incase

Webmaster: Dustin Lundquist
Last update: 04-13-04