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So
finally Athlon lovers get the motherboard designed for their
system, the only problem is finding drivers that can take advantage
of the new hardware. At the time of writing we are still waiting
for such drivers and they should be out by the time you read
this, we hope. Either way you can still take advantage of AGPx4
mode (not that it's a huge difference with current GeForces),
just not the full potential of the new chipset surrounding it.
Installation
Previous
boards for Slot-A have been rather complicated and in some cases
tedious to set-up (Asus K7M), Solteks is a far cry from the
prehistoric confusion of old. Here we have a board where most
of the settings are bios controlled with the notable exception
of the FSB, so all you have to do is plug it in and connect
the cables. If you want to tweak then you can but it's a very
strait forward board, recommended for newbies or those that
just want to save themselves a lot of time.
The
only problem we had was in trying to get the ATA66mb IBM IDE
drives to actually be detected as 66Mbs ones. Despite using
the proper ATA66 cable, it constantly booted with the wording
that we were missing some 'IDE 80 conductor cable' or something
along those lines. No matter what BIOS tweaks/changes we could
think of or make, it still dete
cted
the Hard Disk(s) as 33Mbs UDMA and not 66Mbs (both are ATA66Mbs
on the primary port).
We
also noticed two other rather serious problems for the overclockers
among you, notably was the fact that the ATX Power connector
was close to the back of the CPU. This meant that you couldn't
fit a proper cooling device; we got around this by replacing
our huge fan with one from a dead K6, still big enough and did
the job. Another problem was the confusing layout of the case
connectors (Power switch, IDE Led etc.). The manual was a little
confusing and lacked the needed information. In the end we did
it by trial and error, other than that it was a flawless operation
to physically install the board.
Set-up
The
BIOS did a quick job of auto detecting the needed settings;
we adjusted them to make the best possible use of the system
before saving and restarting. You don't need to adjust them
but being tech nuts we feel it's our duty to overclock or get
the most out of any system, no matter what!
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