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Dual Bios
Another very strong feature that stroke me as important is Dual
Bios technology. Yes, you read this correctly. The motherboard has two BIOS's.
For example if one BIOS should stop working for whatever reason (virus,
crash, static). The 2nd BIOS immediately takes over the 1st BIOS. Therefore
your system will work and operate as normal. There has been some criticism
on this feature in other reviews. It came to my ear that dual bios was
not need and came to the expense of the consumer since they are paying
for it.
I do not agree, a motherboards worst nightmare
is it's BIOS. I have red somewhere once that more then 60% of
motherboard returned simply have a BIOS problem. If you short out for
whatever reason the chance is high that the Bios on that motherboard is
the buffer section to which all power will be diverted. Recently a
friend of mine had a shortage in his system probably due to a faulty
connector. Immediately his system shut down and his BIOS was
fried.
The Dual Bios
technology prevents the need for sending back your highly needed
motherboard. And hey ... in the future when you flash your bios, you
won't have to cross your thumbs anymore, you know that you are safe with
the 2nd BIOS installed.
the AMR Slot
On the mainboard you will notice a new port also, this is the
low-cost Audio Modem solution that I was talking about.
AMR means Audio / Modem riser, the AMR
specification is an open industry standard specification that defines a
hardware motherboard rise board and interface, which supports both audio
and modem, while also addressing specific functional limitations of
today's audio and modem subsystems.
Benchmarks
Right, do you have enough of the technical blah blah ? Do you want to
see how this motherboard holds up against other solutions ? Let's do some
benchmarking.
All benchmarks are based up-on a 333/66
Mhz Mendocino processor system with 64 Mb PC-100 SDRAM. Unfortunately I
was unable to benchmark the system with V-Sync disabled. I simply could
not find a way/util that supports disabling this function. Therefore average
frame rates compared to other cards may result in a lower score
since FPS was synced at 85 Hz thus 85 Frames per Second..
| benchmark
Celeron 333 |
result |
| Wizstone |
12.9 |
| Wizmark |
38953 |
| X Bootmark |
63.79 |
| CPU Integer |
975
Mips |
| Sandra CPU wetstone |
389
MFlops |
| 3D Marks max 800x600x16 |
2322 |
| OpenGL |
32
MPixels/s |
The results shown here are
pretty good for a celeron 333 Mhz based system. In fact they are on par with what
I expected. A
comparable videocard for the i810's video section is something like a
TNT (1) card but then slightly faster. On a Pentium 3 500 Mhz system
this motherboard would get a Winstone rating of about 29.9 (Business).
I normally enter these
statistics into a comparisation chart with all kinds of ranging
videocards to compare. Unfortunately, I was not able to review this
motherboard with the processor that benchmarked all other cards. Therefore
I can not compare objectively with figures and statistics. However, I can simply tell you that the video-section ranges somewhere
between TNT (1) and Voodoo 2 SLI.
And that is pretty good for a low-cost
140$ solution wouldn't you agree ?
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