EQS A14K8

The EQS A14K8 is a no frills budget board with very few features, much like the ECS 755-A2, except it uses the VIA K8T800 chipset.

The features are sparse and simple but it still includes sound and networking, albeit only six channel and 100Mb respectively. Everything you need for a moderately specified system is included though, with 2 SATA channels provided by the chipset, which support RAID. It also has firewire and a game port, so multimedia is adequately catered for.

This board is one of the narrowest in the round up and should be able to fit in older ATX cases, which is important if you need a budget upgrade to an older system. The component layout is acceptable but the graphics card comes close to interfering with the memory slot latches. Happily, the ATX power connectors are located so as to keep the leads away from the CPU fan. The graphics card is held in the slot with a small sliding latch, which is very stiff and hard to operate, thanks to a couple of capacitors which get in the way.

The manual is unimpressive, with fuzzy black and white photos, and simple line diagrams. The physical installation of the board is covered well, but the bios options and driver setup are skimmed over in only a few pages.

The EQS A14K8 has no overclocking options at all in the BIOS. There isn't even memory timing adjustment. There is the possibility of using a third party piece of software such as ClockGen to squeeze a little more value for money out of your system, but even this would only provide FSB and CPU voltage options.

The board comes with PC-Cillin Antivirus as well as PowerQuest Partition Magic and Drive Image. At £58.75, this is the closest competition for ECS. Annoyingly, both boards are a little harder to get hold of than the bigger brands. The A14K8 is a excellent budget upgrade that does not sacrifice performance. If you don't need any fancy features, but need Athlon 64 performance for little money, this is a good choice.

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