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Apollo Pro 133A based motherboards have been selling very well in the past year primarily due to their excellent performance/price ratio and good feature set. In this review, we will be taking a look at one such board based upon the said chipset-- but with a twist.
80% Rating: 
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DFI CA64-EC |
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Gaming Performance
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Not bad for a 66MHz
memory bus. As with the remainder of the tests, we should see a good increase in
FPS once DFI adds the asynchronous memory feature.
As DFI's CA64-EC uses a low end AC97 CODEC, our expectations
in terms of audio quality were conservative. Audio output of the CA64-EC showed
some degree of interference, which may be acceptable for medium quality PC
speakers. However, connecting a high-end set of PC speakers (or even a set of
good headphones) can reveal the background hiss of the AC97 CODEC. Other than
that interference the sound output was rather acceptable.
Most DFI boards
we've tested so far on PCstats have proved to be mediocre overclocking
platforms, while offered high stability standards. The CA64-EC paired with our
reference Celeron 566MHz showed that it had decent overclocking potential. We've
managed to touch a speed of 710MHz (by using a 83MHz bus setting) with absolute
stability. This is 25% increase over nominal speed and is a very good sign
considering that many of the VIA based boards we've tested so far were extremely
poor Celeron II overclockers.
One downside of this board is the lack of
an adjustment for Vcore. DFI should seriously reconsider adding voltage support
to this particular model since it is marketed as an affordable power
platform.
Conclusions
The DFI CA64-EC has a number of advantages over competitive
products. These being ATA-100 support, AGP-PRO slot, support for gigantic
heatsinks, very good board quality, decent overclocking capabilities and all
this can be had for an extremely low price (can be found for only 78$ on
Pricewatch). Despite the fact that lacks a manual voltage adjustment, its price
makes the CA64-EC just too low to pass up, especially when considering its
performance and feature set.
All-in-all, the DFI CA64-EC has a great deal
of good going for it and should be taken into consideration, especially when
looking for a solid product that is aggressively
priced.
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