The mainboard touts several safety enhancing features
which are significant..
-
CPU Fan Protection. When enabled in the BIOS, it has
the capability of monitoring the CPU fan during bootup, and will
automatically power down the system, if the CPU fan didn't rotate.
Considering just how HOT Athlon and Duron cores can become, this could be a
lifesaving feature.
-
Standby Power LED's. The DIMM & PCI Power
LED's will turn red when the systems power is on or when it is in a Suspend
state. This is mainly just an "idiotproofing" feature, to keep you from
doing something stupid, like plugging in a card or mucking about in your
case with a screwdriver, while the system is in still on.
-
AGP 4x mode LED. This LED is active when "duh" it
detects an AGP 4x capable card.
Here's a picture of the locations of these lights, with
annotations, as my camera didn't show them well.
The BIOS is your standard Award fare, with all the
familiar Award tweaks. You can set the memory to run at 100 or 133mhz. The BIOS
does have FSB tweaks in 1mhz increments, as well as vcore adjustments. Unlike
the Abit KT7, Asus A7V, or the MSI K7-Master (which are the crème-de-la-crème of
KT133 overclocking boards) there are no multiplier adjustments available, which
means it's X-Acto knife and pencil-time if you plan on overclocking, as the
majority of Athlon boards just aren't amenable to FSB overclocking. The Duron I
used to test the board unfortunately is not mine, and I prefer not to go hacking
and penciling other peoples processors, so no overclocking was possible via that
method here.
Next page: Testing setup
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