With such abundance on the market the board makers try to draw
attention of customers by any means: textolite often serves as an easel and a
standard package is stuffed with as much software and various accessories as possible.
Acorp also follows this way: PCBs of this company are not typically green, and
CDs bundled contain not only necessary drivers. Now the Acorp's boards will come
together with the SmartPanel II which was announced quite a long time ago but
wasn't put in any box yet.
Accessories:
- Package: a standard design and large dimensions (355x315 mm);
- Documentation: a user manual in English;
- Cables: 1 ATA66/100/133 and 1 FDD;
- Calendar-ruler:
- SmartPanel II;
- CD with software including:
- drivers;
- user manual in PDF;
- Adobe Acrobat Reader;
- Norton Antivirus 2002;
- Norton Ghost 6;
- ImageMore;
- WinDVD.
The layout has some drawbacks: the IDE and FDD connectors are
located behind the PCI slot, the power connector and audio-ins are between the
AGP slot and the back panel of the board, and when a video card in installed it's
not easy to handle the memory modules. It's not difficult to reach jumpers even
when the board is already installed. Their functions are shown on the textolite.
The 3-channel switching voltage regulator incorporates 3 capacitors
of 3300 uF and 3 of 2200 uF and several less capacious ones.
The following controllers are integrated:
- audio controller based on the Avance Logic ALC101 AC'97 codec.
The board has connectors for SmartPanel II which looks like
a bracket designed for a 5" bay. The panel incorporates 2 USB ports, a serial
port, audio controller Line-Out, Mic-In, Line-In, 9 LEDs and a Flash button for
BIOS booting (the given model doesn't support this function). The LEDs monitor
the booting process and you can find out about problems using the table of POST
codes.
Non-unsoldered connectors: jumpers for a CPU frequency and
a SmartPanel II connector to choose the bootable Flash EEPROM (there is no space
for a second Flash EEPROM chip in this PCB version).
The system monitoring is supported by the Winbond W83697HF
chip. What is controlled:
- processor voltage (+3.3, +5 and +12 V), AGP and memory buses, VBAT and +5
V Standby;
- speed of 2 fans;
- temperatures of the processor (a built-in sensor) and the board (a built-in
sensor).
There are 2 connectors for adjustable connection of fans and
1 for non-adjustable connection.
Brief characteristics of the board: memory slots - 3
DDR SDRAM; expansion slots - AGP/ 6 PCI; I/O ports - 2 COM/ LPT/ 2 PS/2/ 4 USB
1.1; dimensions - 305x210 mm.
Adjustment can be carried out with:
| jumpers and switches |
Jumper to clear up the CMOS |
 |
| Jumper to choose a FSB frequency |
|
| Switches to choose a CPU multiplier |
|
| Switches to choose a BIOS Mirror mode |
 |
| Switches to choose a language of the Voice Genie
function |
|
| BIOS based on the 6.00PG version from Phoenix-Award |
Setup of memory timings |
+ |
CAS Latency, Bank Interleave, Precharge to Active, Active to
Precharge, Active to CMD, DRAM Queue Depth, DRAM Command Rate |
| Setup of memory frequency |
+ |
100, 133 and 166 MHz |
| Setup of AGP bus |
+ |
|
| Setup of PCI bus |
+ |
|
| Changeable scaler of AGP and PCI buses |
- |
|
| Manual assignment of interrupts |
- |
|
| Changeable FSB frequency |
+ |
100-166 MHz in 1 MHz steps |
| Changeable CPU multiplier |
- |
|
| Changeable core voltage |
- |
|
| Changeable memory voltage |
- |
|
| Changeable chipset voltage |
- |
|
| Changeable AGP bus voltage |
- |
|
We used the latest available version of the BIOS - 1.2.
The board is not extraordinary, but it is not typical of Acorp.
It works not very fast but confidently, which is peculiar to all its inexpensive
products. Only the SmartPanel II can attract your attention exactly to this model.
Test results:
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