The BIOS is this board is well equipped with the Award BIOS
we have all got to know and love. RAM tweakabilty stopped at latency selection
and PCI x3 or x4. I was dissapointed not to see memory-interleaving as this
gives a huge performance increase as seen on the KT7. An option I have recently
started to use, is STR and STD.
STR - Suspend to Ram is so damn useful, you just push your power
button (or select it from the shut down menu) and it turns the whole computer
off except keeps the RAM alive. Then when you need your computer you press
the power button and it INSTANTLY returns to exactly where you left it! This
is really handy if you have a lot of browser windows open and need to go to
sleep, you just leave them until the next day. Even better - why not use the
Alarm BIOS option? I have my computer to automatically come out of suspension
at 7am each morning :D the best alarm in the world.
Of course, if you have a power cut in the night - you are a
bit buggered as your RAM shuts down, which is where STD comes in handy. Suspend
to Disk is basically where windows dumps the entire contents of the RAM to
your harddrive, then next time you boot up - it gets the the starting windows
screen and then copies it back into the ram. This is not the same instantanouness
of STD and doesn't support the alarm function, but if your power goes it still
works (and is still v. useful)
I know these are not new functions, but these last few weeks
using this board have been the first times I have used them - and they are
VERY useful (at least for me). I thought I would mention them becuase I had
a problem. With STR, it reset any overclocking you did whenever you come out
of suspend. I hope this problem will be fixed with a new BIOS update...
Conclusion
If I had an award system of some sort, an award would go to
this board as a board for building on the cheap. Take this board and all you
need is RAM, CPU and harddrive. Then when you get some more cash, you can
upgrade the graphics card! If I had been ignorant enough to buy an OEM machine
- I would be pleased to find this board in it, becuase I could crank my CPU
up to speed. Lack of voltage control is remedied with a pencil, although I/O
voltage may have come in handy. The lack of PCI slots is limiting to the power
user, but to most it's not. With onboard ATA/100, you can assume most people
would not use a HotRod with this (as I did), would most probably not have
an NIC, but a modem (which could be an AMR modem) so infact for a lot of people
there may be enough slots. Lack of multiplier support also limits this board
when using the lower chips and wanting to overclock.
I think the KM133 chipset is going to dent the Celeron's percentage
of the budget market even more now that onboard graphics is finally available.
I have had absolutley no stability problems over these last
few weeks under Windows 2000 and ME. .
What it all comes down to is, for it's size, it packs a punch!
Spode
