Installing the board was easy enough. If you notice the
line of capacitors to the side of the processor socket, keep in mind that some
heatsinks will have difficulty fitting without modifications. I tried to fit a
Thermaltake Golden Orb, but without taking a file to it, it simply wouldn't fit.
I ended up putting a Taisol CEK724 heatsink in the system, along with the
Celeron2-600 from our previous OverclockWarehouse
review. The Taisol, is actually from a retail Duron 700 box!! But it fit
just fine, and has the added benefit of a small but worthwhile 7000rpm fan! With
this sink, the system at idle hovered around 24c, and under Prime95, checks in
at 36c.
When you first boot the machine, you'll be greeted with a somewhat different
"splash screen" that you might be used to on an Award BIOS board.
Once you get beyond this though, it's your standard
Award BIOS affair. The big area of concern for VIA boards, is memory bus
performance, and here, while not providing the much needed 4-way interleave
setting, everything is intact. P2C Concurrency and ReadAroundWrite settings can
be enabled. The board can sense SPD, and can have CAS set manually. Memory speed
options are the typical Normal/Fast/Turbo. We'll see the results of memory
testing later. The board does have a set of jumpers to help override CPU
detection, allowing you to force a CPU to 100 or 133 FSB, which could be useful
for overclocking.
Also to be found is a Frequency/Voltage adjustment menu. Alas, something is
missing...
There are no voltage adjustments to be had here. This is
the 2nd manufacturer to have this menu in the BIOS, and have some (and in the
case of the ECS, a meager selection) of FSB speeds to select, but NO voltage
tweaks. Please, someone at least rename this section of the BIOS, so I wont get
my hopes up. :)
Still, I did attempt to do some overclocking with this board, and the
Overclockwarehouse provided Celeron2-600 that I've had stable at 1008mhz.
Although there is a set of jumpers, as mentioned above, for forcing a 66mhz CPU
like this one to 100mhz, I was unable to get the CPU stable at this setting
(9x100), most likely due to the lack of ability to up core voltage just a hair.
The highest bus speed available in "66mhz" mode is 83mhz, and I was able to
stably run the CPU at 747mhz, which isn't too bad, but 900+ would have been
nicer.
Next page: benchmarks!
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