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Intel D810E2CA3 Motherboard Review
Intel D810E2CA3 Motherboard Review - PCSTATS
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:   
Filed under: Motherboards Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: Intel Mar 18 2001   P. Masrani  
Home > Reviews > Motherboards > Intel D810E2CA3

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

· Intel Celeron 566MHz FCPGA (OEM)
· 128 MB PC 133 CAS 3 SDRAM
· 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP
· Western Digital 30GB ATA 66 hard drive (307AA), 5400RPM
· Orchid Nusound 3D (Aureal Vortex 1 sound card)
· 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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Contents of Article: Intel D810E2CA3
 Pg 1.  Intel D810E2CA3 Motherboard Review
 Pg 2.  — First Impressions
 Pg 3.  Integrated graphics performance

 
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