As I promised several weeks ago I will try to present you most of the KT266A motherboards that appear on retailers shelves. It's clear that AMD was not able to popularize the new Athlon XP as much as Intel did with Pentium 4. That's why the manufacturers offer based on VIA Athlon chipsets was lower than expected. Although VIA did their best to reduce the manufacturer implementation efforts we really can not say that too many companies hurried to present KT266A based motherboards. Yes, it's true that they had another choice with nVidia nForce chipset, but there are not many nForce boards on the market either. It's quite obvious that it is harder to implement nForce than KT266A and the final costs are higher so nForce can not be a real reason for KT266A motherboards decreased convergence. But I have to remark a good point: most KT266A motherboards which have appeared on the market until now are very good. Based on my experience with Epox 8HKA+ and MSI K7T266 Pro2 it's clear that KT266A motherboards are not meant for disappointing.
Let's take a look to the third KT266A motherboard that entered our lab: DFI AD70-SR.

Identification

DFI is quite a popular manufacturer in many areas and Romania is a location where DFI motherboards are appreciated. The motherboard we reviewed is revision AA2, the mobo version with RAID onboard. When you open the box you can see inside that DFI didn't make economy on IDE cables: three IDE cables, almost all you need to run the board at full storage capacity. Beside the cables in the box there are the other required things: a floppy cable, one floppy disk with Promise RAID drivers, one CD-ROM disk, one RAID manual and one user's manual. The user's manual is made in DFI traditional fashion: four languages, decent information, but no hardware installation advice. Quite funny DFI thought that it was interesting to present in the manual's end which are the visual characteristics of a multiplier unlocked Athlon. There is a nice picture there with the L1 bridges. Good, but before dealing with overclocking I really think that everybody should be able to install the motherboard in the case. But I'm sure it isn't the first time when I speak about this kind of lack in the manual. BIOS features are mostly presented only for reference so the best way to know them is to try their functions. :)
AD70-SR provides good expandability options; there are five PCI, one AGP and three DIMM slots on board. The mobo has also traces for a CNR slot, but the space is empty.
Considering the Promise 20265R RAID controller that can be found onboard I really think that the motherboard expandability options cover most user needs.
I cannot say that AD70-SR is a small motherboard. Its dimensions are quite big and the design could look strange due to the lack of organization suggested. On the board there are a lot of capacitors, several of them being close to the AGP slot. The bigger 2700uF ones are located near the CPU socket in a regular position. I liked that DFI left enough space near the socket for a large cooler. The KT266A chipset is protected from overheating using a heatsink attached with thermal adhesive paper. The ATX connector is in a position less inspired because all the cables will go above the CPU fan, limiting airflow. There are three fan headers onboard, two of them close to the CPU socket. I didn't like that there are two capacitors near the memory slots which may make the board's installation harder in smaller cases. You can use up to six USB devices with AD70-SR, but four ports are available on the internal USB headers. You will have to buy an USB bracket because DFI didn't ship one in the box.
The RAID version of the board doesn't have onboard audio, but you cannot consider this a problem. The board version without the RAID controller has the audio part onboard.

AD70-SR product picture

AD70-SR can be proud that it has four jumpers and a DIP bank, but we will discuss about their functions in the next sections. I don't think that you are able to see in the above picture, but the wake-on-LAN header is placed in a very interesting position between the forth and the fifth PCI slot.