Installation
The board follows the regular ATX standards, it installed straight into the Globalwin 802 chassis with no problems, the ATX power connector is in a bit of an odd position compared to most other boards I've used but this caused no problems anyway. The manual is pretty clear and easy to follow. This board is another that uses dipswitches to set the multiplier and FSB speed, and also the CPU voltage. The voltage adjustments take a rather different approach to normal and allow up to 0.4 of a volt of over default CPU voltage, but only in 0.1 volt steps, this is a rather big leap, normally 0.05 volt step adjustments are used, but it still get the job done, and the fact that you can get the voltage all the way up to 2.25 volts is nothing short of a miracle for serious overclocking, some serious cooling would be needed here!!. As the machine POST's (Power On Self Test) the LED on the corner of the board whizz through a number of different numbers, if there is a problem they allow you to find out what is wrong, To do this you need to consult the manual and figure out the error codes. Fortunately I had no problems at all so I haven't used this feature. There are only 2 DIMM slots but really this a bad thing, at the moment 256MB DDR RAM modules are widely available and 512MB will serve the needs of every gamer/ overclocker at the moment, as DDR RAM gets more widespread 512MB DIMM's will become available meaning that 1GB of RAM will be possible. The AGP slot has a little clip on it to stop the AGP card falling out during transport this might be useful to some people who transport their PCs about to LAN's etc. I cant say I've ever had a problem with the graphics card falling out, but some people might appreciate this little extra touch.Anyway on with setting it up. I did a clean install of Windows 98SE this all went fine, and I soon had Windows working, the Epox Driver CD had AMD 4.80 patch for the AGP controller, and then I installed the VIA Bus master driver from the CD. All that was left was the Via Audio, I installed this to test it out, it works, but there is some CPU overhead and consequential slight slowdown with the onboard sound so I decided to install a SoundBlaster Live 1024 card instead. I put in the usual Benchmark program's to see how fast it was all working.
