Before I start this review, I want to clear up my reasoning
for saying this is board is made by TMC or DFI. Well over here in the UK,
TMC distribute this motherboard. But when searching all over the site, I could
find nothing about this board (I knew it was new at the time, but not THAT
new), but I DID find the motherboard on the DFI website. The specs where identical,
it was the same board. At this point I was very confused.
Seeing as this board was not on the TMC site, I took out another
board I had - the AK74-EC. I took the latest BIOS from the TMC
site and then went to the DFI site and took
a BIOS of the same date. And they were exactly identical! Not only that, but
the DFI site actually had a NEWER release of a BIOS for the AK74. So if you
currently have a TMC board goto DFI for a possibility of a newer BIOS release
and in general a better website. Just to make sure I was right in my information,
I e-mailed TMC, they replied "DFI is our manufacturing partner in Taiwan."
coupled with some information I found on the TMC about section, DFI make em,
TMC give support in the UK.
Now that we have cleared that matter up - let's maybe get onto
reviewing this board?
The AM35 is a Socket A motherboard, which is most likely aimed
at the Duron budget market. But don't let that put you off this board.
It uses the KM133 chipset and the 686B south bridge giving It
native ATA/100 support. For full specs - goto their site
Just by looking at the board, you can see that it is very small at only 244x220.
Because of this, it is rather lacking in expansion slots. It has the usual
AGP 4x, an AMR slot and 2 PCI (1 shared with ISA). This is particularly poor,
once I had my Radeon, NIC and HotRod 100 card in there - I had nothing left
for my TV Card...
There are only 2 DIMM slots, which may also be a problem for
some. As I said before this board is aimed at the budget user, which shows
with it's integrated AC97 sound and Savage 4 video (more on this later). Fortunetley
there was enough clearance on the socket to fit a Super Orb if one particularly
wanted one. I found the position of the ATX plug a little annoying as my cable
was too short (due to some trimming I once did) - I would have preffered a
position much like the KT7.
