Well, now that the trolls have spoken their crud, let's put it this way-the "far superior" performance of the AMD761/VIA686b combination is about 2-3%. Big deal. Now for the kicker-almost everyone in here who owns the A7A266 has been completely happy with it. There are at least 15 yehs to three or four nays. And not one mention of any PCI compatabilities, or any of the other minor problems VIA is so infamous for. I build systems for a living and would only use the ALi if a customer requested an Athlon system.
There have ben minor complaints of problems that have mostly boiled down to the a few assembly eror-one guy monted his board wrong and shorted it out, two guys used too small a power supply, one guy used an old version of the ALi AGP driver, and four or five guys did not follow the recommendation of upgrading the BIOS to version 1.004. None of these problems indicate a poor quality motherboard or chipset. So I recommend the A7A266 simply for the compatability, forget the 2-3% performance penalty (compared to the A7M266) that all these guys are whining about.
Video killed my Radio Card!