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As stated on the previous page of the most important aspects of
the i810 based chipsets is its ability to do 2D/3D graphics. The i810
is actually based up-on the core of the i752 graphics chip. This chip
would have been the follow up of the i740 graphics card but was
cancelled due to lack of sales and strong competition from 3dfx,
nVIDIA, Matrox and S3. It has a dual rendering pipeline and
the performance should be a bit faster then the i740 and thus should
be ranging on the speed of a TNT (1) card or 3dfx Banshee based card.
When the i810 boots up it'll reserve 1 MB of main memory for the basic
display buffer. As soon as GUI (graphical user interface ->
Windows) has started the controller will reserve 4Mb frame buffer, 2Mb
command buffer and 4Mb of Z-Buffer. Highest 3D resolution is 1280x1024
in 16 bit. The highest 2D resolution that we could test was 1600x1200 in 256 colors.
[ Click to enlarge ]
Beware the i810 is not a gamers dream
if you are a hardcore gamer, however with the DC-100 version playing
games will be faster then a TNT (1) based chipset, plus: all mayor
Hardware 3D functions are present in the chipset. It will give you some nice
playability in games with a very descent frame rate.
Another 'include' in the i810 is an
option that was born out of the i752 also, the ability to do hardware
motion compensation for MPEG2-decoding. So the i810 can play DVD's
realtime.
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Motherboard
Specifications
|
| CPU
Interface |
Intel
Celeron Mendocino Slot-1 |
| Chipset |
Intel
810-DC100 |
| L2
Cache |
N/A
(on-chip) |
| Form
Factor |
ATX |
| Bus
Speeds |
66
/ 75 / 83 / 100 |
| Clock
Multipliers |
3x
-9.5x |
| Voltages
Supported |
Auto
Detect |
| Memory
Slots |
2
168pin DIMM Slots
512Mb max. |
| Expansion
Slots |
1
AMR Slots
0 AGP Slot
5 PCI Slots
0 ISA Slots (1 Shared with PCI)
1 TV-Out / Digital Flat Panel Daughter card connector |
| BIOS |
Award
green P&P |
The mobo gives us some very nice (read: hot) new options like Ultra DMA-66 (the
ability to read 66Mb/sec with a compatible Ultra DMA-66 Hard drive)
Digital Audio
Due to the nature of the integrated Yamaha 744 Sound chip it is
possible to have more optionals on-board. On the motherboard you'll
fine connectors for CD-In, AUX-In and last bust very important a SPDIF
output connector. This connector is capable of providing digital
audio towards an external amplifier or even (if you have DVD-Rom)
compressed AC-3 data to an external Dolby Digital Decoder.
Ultra DMA-66 Bus master IDE
Practically all new design motherboard now have Synchronous Ultra DMA mode,
which provides data transfer rates up-to a
maximum of 66Mb per second. Which roughly is twice the data rate of
enhanced IDE or ATA-2. Ultra ATA requires a special (included) hd
cable. Although the cable has 40 pins, it actually uses 80 wires.
TIP
- always connect the cable in this fashion: Blue to mainboard,
Gray
to slave and black to master.
Health Monitoring
Another option that
stroke my attention as important is the exceptionally good HEALTH
MONITORING. See for yourself what this motherboard monitors:
Monitoring of +/-5v, +/-12v, and CMOS battery voltages
Monitoring of connected CPU, power supply, and system fans
System health status reporting via BIOS, LDCM & SIV
Auto processor speed reduction and speaker alarm if CPU overheats (OS
independent & driverless). Lovely! Furthermore the Bios is very easy
to use and all functions are set at default to it's best.
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