Asus Nforce board to cost $200

But before I started my long journey to Londinium, I could not resist writing about a piece in Italian magazine PC Professionale about an Asus A7N266.

We hadn't thought from talking to Asus that the A7N266 board could arrive so soon, but there's a review of the bambino in the Italian magazine's September issue.

This is not an early sample, and there's even prices - with the board market at €234.57, around $200 or so. So the boards will be in shops soon - but probably in Akihabara Japan first, as usual.

This Nvidia-Asus combo doesn't seem that expensive for a board with Geforce 2 MX 400, Dolby digital 5.1 surround, 100 Mbit LAN inside Just plug some Athlon or Duron and DDR and you are ready to rock'n'rolla.

According to PC Professionale, the board is based on the Nforce 420 that we used to call Crush 12, using the GeForce 2 MX 400 as its integrated graphic processor, and having AGP 4X, five PCI ports, one CNR and an active cooler on the North Bridge. For networking, the board uses Realtek RTL 8100 10/100 Mbit interface.

The board also will use Sound Max 2.0, we think.

I almost forgot - there were some benchmarks here with the machine having 256MB of memory and a 1.4 Athlon C. Content creation Winstone 2001 - 69.1 - is one of the results and there are plenty more in the magazine.

AMD's Hypertransport is used to connect IGP and MCP - the "media communication processor" which is just a fancy marketing name for the South Bridge. It provides 800 MB/s between two bridges and stays there proud as proof of cooperation and the special relations between Chimpzilla and Graphzilla.

Like Nvidia folks have told us - When you see Nforce you are looking at a similar thing as Xbox. I just hope that the Xbox graphic will be better than MX400.

There is some information about this review on the Asus site, and you can find the PDF by going here. µ