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We are currently witnessing a flooding of high performance motherboards on the market today. These days, the fastest motherboard may only be marginally faster than the slowest ones available. Without a doubt, the mainboard and chipset market is no less than cutthroat. Though most users are accustomed to seeing such products available in abundance, a significant portion of the market remains interested on those products that focus upon the delivery of good business performance at a low cost.
75% Rating: 
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Motherboards >
Intel D810E2CA3 |
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First Impressions
The D810E2CA3 is one
of the most feature furnished integrated board that we have seen. Equipped with
an on board video accelerator and a sound card, no additional cards would be
necessary for basic system operation.
Layout wise, the D810E2CA3 is well
designed. The three PCI slots available can accommodate full sized expansion
cards. A total of 2 x 3300µF and 4 x 820µF capacitors loom about the area of the
CPU. Fortunately, the area around the CPU socket is spacious enough to easily
house a very large heatsink/fan. Two on board fan headers provide for a user's
cooling options.
To wrap up the list of on board characteristics, the
board comes fitted with a system speaker. The manual was very well written, had
explanations about each installation step and other useful info such as BIOS
flashing/recovering, board power consumption specifications, error messages and
beeps codes, etc.
Like all new generation Intel boards, the D810E2CA3
features Intel's Rapid BIOS which reduces POST and BOOT process times by about
80%. The BIOS can be flashed within the Windows OS using the Intel Express BIOS
Update utility.
Included with this board comes Norton Internet Security
2000; a suite of applications consisting of the following applications: Norton
Antivirus 2000, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton Privacy Control and Norton
Parental Control. Encryption Plus Secure Export, which allows compression and
encryption of confidential information, has also been included in the software
bundle.
The different aspects of system power and thermal conditions can
be monitored with Intel's Active monitor, which unlike other monitoring
applications requires only 1% of system resources.
Installation
Installation of the
D810E2CA3 went smoothly. Motherboard drivers were installed without any
problems. There is also a very useful ATA utility in the latest driver set which
displays the ATA protocol and allows the configuration of each IDE peripheral
connected to the system.
Test Bed
Setup
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Intel Celeron 566MHz FCPGA
(OEM) |
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128 MB PC 133 CAS 3 SDRAM |
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3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP |
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Western Digital 30GB ATA 66 hard drive
(307AA), 5400RPM |
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Orchid Nusound 3D (Aureal Vortex 1 sound
card) |
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Tested boards: DFI CS65 SC (Intel 815), Soyo
6BA+IV (Intel BX), Soyo 7VMA (VIA PM133), DFI CA64 EC (VIA Apollo Pro 133A
with ATA 100 support), Intel D8102CB and Intel
D810E2CA3 |
All benchmarks were run under Windows 98 (first edition) with each test
running three times. All boards (except the Intel D8102CB and D8102CA3) were
outfitted with a Voodoo5 5500 video adapter.
Business
Performance
The D810E2CA3 manages to display superb business performance even when
paired with low cost processor. Furthermore, it was capable enough to outperform
many other motherboards which were equipped with an expensive AGP video
accelerator.
If testing was done using a high end processor (Pentium III
1000MHz), results would have most likely been in favor of other tested boards
used in comparison as the integrated video accelerator offers limited 2D
acceleration. We must also note that all i810E2 boards have their memory bus
locked at 100 MHz regardless of the processor bus (which may run asynchronous).
Knowing this, the D810E2CA3 would be an excellent choice for Celeron processors
especially.
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