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This economical motherboard is meant for general home and
office use and has good performance and features. It's built on Intel 915G
chipset, and has a socket 775 for P4. The board supports 800/533 MHz FSB, has
two DIMM slots that can take up to 2 GB DDR 400 RAM. The board has both onboard
graphics as well as a PCI-E X16 slot. There are two PCI slots and an AGP 8X
slot. It has two SATA connectors and strangely only one PATA connector. Though
PATA hard drives are becoming obsolete, optical drives still have not shifted to
SATA. It would have been nice if it had two PATA connectors.
It also has six USB ports-four fixed towards the
rear and two in the front of the cabinet. The board even supports Gigabit LAN
and 6-Channel audio. It also has a feature called System Overclock Saver to
prevent system instability if you do overclocking; the Motherboard
Intelligent Tweaker, CPU Intelligent Accelerator and Memory Intelligent Booster
applications. To build an office desktop, it has a good feature called Corporate
Online Management to allow MIS engineers to monitor and control the system via
the Internet. The motherboard even has an Xpress Recovery feature that can
backup the BIOS for better protection. Plus, the board also bundles Norton
Internet Security Suite 2005. We tested the board using BW 2002 for basic
productivity apps, MCCW 2003 for high-end multimedia creation apps, 3DMark 2005
for graphics and Doom3 for gaming. For tests, we used a P4 3.6 GHz, 1 GB DDR 400
RAM and a 7,200 rpm IDE drive. The board scored 36.1 in BW and a good 60.2 in
MCCW tests. The low 3DMark score of 205 is understandable because its onboard
graphics is only meant for basic productivity. The 54.2 fps it gave in Doom3 is
good for occasional and lightweight gaming.
Bottom Line: The board is ideal for homes or office
desktops given its low cost, features, and performance. Plus, its backward
compatibility of an AGP slot also adds to its value.
Anubhav Verma