VIA P4X266 Motherboard Roundup - The Forbidden Five - January 2002

Acorp 4VPX266A

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Acorp was one of the first manufacturers to release a P4X266 based motherboard however in spite of this, they still fail to offer any kind of recognition or support for the 4VPX266A on their website. This in itself makes the 4VPX266A a board you should stay away from since you won't be seeing any active support from the manufacturer for the product. In all fairness to Acorp, they are not big enough to deal with Intel's pressures to not promote/support the forbidden VIA chipset but in defense of the end user, they'd be better off not making the board at all.

It's really a shame that Acorp doesn't offer much support for the board since it would have potential if they spent a little time with it. The board has a pretty basic setup from an expansion slot standpoint; featuring 5 PCI slots and 3 DIMM slots. There is an option in the Acorp BIOS labeled "Performance Mode" which when enabled would cause random reboots with all 3 DIMM slots populated; thus we disabled Performance Mode for our testing of the motherboard.

The board uses Avance Logic's entry-level AC'97 codec, the ALC100, and there is clearly a reason why most manufacturers prefer the ALC200 series over this solution; the audio output was very poor in quality and the sound would cut out at times. We are not entirely sure if this is a problem with the codec or Acorp's board-level implementation of the codec; in either case, it's unacceptable and makes the onboard audio virtually useless.

Acorp was smart enough to use the VIA network controller contained within the VT8233 South Bridge coupled with an external VIA physical layer to provide 10/100 LAN support to the board. Unfortunately, going along with their theme of ignoring the existence of the board neither the LAN or the audio drivers were provided for download at Acorp's website.