Sweet sensational motherboard.
Written: Oct 03 '01 (Updated Oct 03 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: affordable and a 'wow' product
Cons: Memory placement could have been better, small issues with irq's.
The Bottom Line: It would be a stretch to do better, and you can certainly do worse.
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| tkeats's Full Review: DFI AK75-EC Motherboard |
I was first introduced to D.F.i. during a A.M.D. System builders seminar in Toronto, Ontario in the spring of 2001. At this point their presentation peaked my curiousness, On my next supply shipment, i included one for myself, for review purposes. With a upcoming reconfiguration of the office network, this would also come in handy, as some people just don't seem to understand the idea, or existance of 'non-microsoft file formats'. Every day I get theses .xls and .doc files that are MS Office. Anyways, i digress.
The AK75-EC mounted in the mid-tower case nicely, this is a 300 Watt Power Supply suggested for the Athlon/Thunderbird class chip series. I chose this so I could upgrade easily to a Gigahertz pluz Athlon chip, from the Duron 800Mhz that I had already received also on order some months ago.
The CPU is a 800 Mhz Duron BOXED CPU
Why the Boxed? 3 Year warranty, with some exceptions, which include overclocking...
The OEM comes with a much more limited warranty, and you must return it from the point of sale, the Boxed, you can call A.M.D. up themselves and say, hey, i have this boxed processor that is under your warranty.
I don't know about you, but i would rather deal with A.M.D. then joe blow down the street for warranty details.
The CPU mounted easily, hard to make a mistake to put this in wrong I would say, pay close attention, just because you always should.
The heatsink was a little hard to put on, the Duron's users manual suggested trying to mount it on a couple times before removing the stick-tape that protected the compound on the bottom of the heatsink.
Oh, its also a good idea to write down your processor's information before you mount the heatsink.
With the Heatsink firmly installed, i connected the fan to the motherboard, this is nice, as it has hardware monitoring of the CPU fan.
The motherboard also had connectors for various other devices, such as an extra chasis fan (again, bios hardware monitoring).
Ahead I go to install the video card, the choice was simple, the unit is to do simple duty as word processing and internet research et al, so I settled for a used AGP Permedia II card I had onhand. Some DVD movies would also be in the cue for use.. (I had started my DVD collection ahead of picking up a DVD ;) )
This card gave me some hassles while installing, altho it works now fine after downloading the drivers from 3DLabs website.
8 Megs video, suffiecient.
256 Megs of SD-Ram, PC133.
Hard drive, again i chose used equipment, I had a 8 Gig Quantum Bigfoot sitting around that came in on trade, it needed a low level format, and it worked just fine.
Removeable Media: 1 1.44MB floppy drive, I am still not convinced I need this still, but when it came to moving drivers from one machine to another with the network not setup yet on the new machine, it was a must.
Removable Media 2: Samsung 16x DVD, a nice unit for watching dvd movies and reading cd's in general.
Network: n/a
First order of business was getting Windows 98SE installed, and yes, windows 98SE has been old faithful for me, for the most part, I don't see why I would need Windows 2000 or higher on any machine.
The few issues i had with the install, where solved with reconfiguring the partition tables, used hard drive, I was also putting Slackware Linux 8.0 on it for other uses....
After getting windows configured, I set about to install linux, this installed simply and more easily for me then Windows ever has.
The Users manual is for the most part well written and easy to follow, I had glanced at it a week in advance, but did not need it to configure this motherboard.
I have yet to run any benchmarks on this board, or even install any, that shall come shortly.
I need to read through the manual right now, to read up on a couple issues i have with irq's being used by more then one device on bootup.
Its been a week since my initial build up of this system, it still have some tweaking to do, but it is excellant, and very stable, both hardware and Software-wise.
At this point, everything but the network card works, and i have yet to tackle that, I also think it will be the last, seeing as i have the tweaking to do with the irq layout.
On a high note, all Windows systems i have had the pleasure of watching, or owning in the past, seem to need a twice daily reboot (we are discussing pre-Pentium systems, and i haven not been in windows alot since I Discovered Linux), this system I have left running outside the bedroom door at home all night, for a week straight, only reboots its needed are those for configuration changes, ie: video, and other 'updates' mandated by MS Office 2000.
I have watched 4 DVD movies with this, all of them without a single problem, Highlander:ENDGAME, Highlander:ENDGAME (a cut that didnt make it, but showed up on the dual dvd set), The Patriot, and Space Cowboys. All of them played back well, with minor problems if any (I do hate it when the sound goes dead in the middle of a movie due to 'shareware').
The Permedia II card handles the DVD playback nicely, and I use both 'PC Friendly' which came on one or more of the DVD's and PowerDVD, which is a wonderful peice of software.
The sound is sufficient, however it is not stereo yet, Another bit of tweaking there i suspect.
The monitor? its a OLD IBM model.. doesn't even have a PS/1, or G40 on the front as my other 2 shop monitors do.
Shortly I am going to be starting the install again from scratch, some oversights I had during initial install.. Windows 98SE likes to eat the C partition when you give it less then a full gig, which I will do on the next install.
This is purely from personal preference, but I like 1 partition system, 1 partition for downloads, and 1 partition for applications, I feel it keeps everything a little tiddier in the end. Oh, can not forget to mention a specific partition for the windows swap file (roughly 320 megs).
The major concern I had was when I installed the harddrive, they had placed the Memory slots in a Verticle position, right behind the 5 1/4" Drive bays, this coupled with having the Quantum Bigfoot being placed in the system, created a tight space where I had to finally move the Drive up to the top position, and put the dvd on the next one down. Everything fits, I am happy.
Check back here soon for further info.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 89.99
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Epinions.com ID:
tkeats
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Member: Thomas Keats
Location: Alliston, Ontario
Reviews written: 32
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
I am a developing a number of Home/Internet Based Businesses.
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