Putting the board inside the chassis was as normal as any other,
although the size of this board did surprise me. I have heard of people not
being able to fit their KT7-RAID boards into a midi-case, and this board is
a good 4-5cm wider (estimated)!
Unlike the KT7-RAID which uses the Highpoint Chips on their
boards for their ATA/100 support, this board uses the newer 686B south bridge
giving it native ATA/100 support.
This board also sports the AC'97 on-board sound. Some people
might be cringing now, but for a lot of people, on-board sound is a god send.
If you are building workstations, having sound is not a priority, so is often
left out - at least now they get this luxury. As far as quality is concerned,
I think it's a case of "quality is a relative term", much like anything
else. When using it, as far as I was concerned it sounds fine, and any difference
in quality was not noticable. Basically if you don't use anything better (so
your mind has something to compare to), you could be very happy with this
bundled feature. I did have a problem when using the bundled drivers, when
playing MP3's, it would suddenly start fast-forwarding through the song. This
was fixed when I downloaded the latest drivers.
I found the socket to be in an excellent position - unlike the
KT7, which was a little close to the edge, this has a good 4cm clearance.
Two "features" of this board are the Dr. Voice and
the die-hard BIOS. The Dr. Voice is an excellent idea as there is no generic
beep-code for every computer - this eliminates that deciphering problem. Although
the voice did get a little on the annoying side, was quite useful when I fried
my Tbird when it gave "Your CPU may have a problem", like duh!
The die-hard BIOS option would be very good, If I had it - as
you basically have two bios chips, so if a flash goes wrong you just switch
inbetween the bios chips to save it. This is not a new idea, as you can buy
such add-ons for everyday motherboards to achieve this function. Infact, I
see this design as one problem if you don't have the die-hard option. The
bios chip used is soldered to the board which means the trick of borrowing
a friend to re-flash your bios for you cannot be used. So a die-hard bios
is a must.
This board sports 6 PCI slots, but have taken the bad route
of including a AMR slot. I prefer a good old ISA slot, and I'm sure a lot
of you out there still using an old ISA NIC or modem will to.
Overclocking
Although they have tried to make this an overclocking friendly
board, I found it to be the exact opposite. They boast of a jumperless design,
but to be quite honest - I would prefer it if it was jumpered. Inside the
bios you can control FSB and voltage. In order to change the multiplier you
need the change the dip switches on the board. Now why is this unfriendly?
Well imagine this, you have set the voltage in the BIOS to 1.85v and then
the dip switches to 1ghz (from your standard 600), fine everything is good.
Then your cmos clears one day- in order to get the system to boot again, you
have to open the computer and reset the dip swtiches in order to get it to
post! Holding down the "home" key will only reset the FSB and voltage
settings in the BIOS. I found this to be quite annoying. In fact, I found
if I increased the voltage by using a pencil instead, I could post the chip
higher than by using the bios voltage setting - this was a good way round
this problem.
Chipset Overclocking and Stability
I had serious overclocking and stability issues with this board.
I made sure nothing was overclocked, yet windows crashed as soon as it was
taken into anything intensive. I was certain this instability was due to the
chipset. I quickly took out my temperature probe and measured the 24k gold
heatsink on the chipset - it was running at 46.6c - not a temperature I would
like. At this point I began thinking that the whole 24k gold heatsink was
a bit of a gimmick, and I would have much preffered to have seen some active
cooling on there...
