Kranion 810E Motherboard

The other motherboard from Cerebra, Kranion KP1M810E, is based on Intel’s 810E chipset. The E after the 810 indicates that it has support for 133 MHz FSB, so you can make use of the latest processors and PC133 SDRAM on this board. It has a Socket 370 interface so it can take Celerons, PIII’s as well as Via Cyrix III processors. Installing the board is no problem at all. The board is completely ‘jumperless’ which means you don’t have to fiddle with jumpers and DIP-switches to select the correct settings for your processor. The board is quite small, which is perhaps why it compromises on expandability. It has only two PCI slots and an AMR slot, which limits what you can put in it. 

It has two DIMM slots, which can together take up to 512 MB RAM. Being Intel 810E chipset based, it has onboard video and sound. You can’t use this board for graphics or gaming due to the onboard graphics, and no provision for adding external graphics. This motherboard also supports only ATA/66 and not ATA/100. 

To test its performance we used a Celeron 600 MHz, with 64 MB RAM, which is a commonly used configuration for this kind of board. We compared the results with our February 2001 motherboard shootout. First we ran Video 2000 to test the overall video capabilities of the motherboard. It scored 1063, which is pretty good score. In both Business Winstone 2001 and Content Creation 2001, it scored 19.5–good figures for this configuration. Next, we ran QuakeIII Arena to check for gaming performance. Here it gave an average frame rate of just above 14 fps–average compared to other similar boards. So clearly, this board is not meant for gaming. Overall in performance, the motherboard is good for productivity work and browsing. 

The motherboard comes with a CD, which contains the motherboard drivers and PC-Cillin Antivirus software. Its attractive price makes it an ideal choice for productivity machines. 

Sachin Makhija at PCQ Labs