Great board from supermicro
Written: Aug 07 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easy to overclock, runs cool, small
Cons: no ISA slots, onboard audio doesn't work in linux
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| Forque's Full Review: Supermicro PIIISCD |
Over the past five years, i've had mostly bad luck with supermicro boards. (I get them from work for "testing" so i'm forced to keep using them) A couple boards were very unstable, one board "boots when it wants to". I've even had one of the old 440FX boards arrive dead. Aside from having on-board adaptec SCSI controllers in them, they really weren't anything special, and were usually bloated in price.
This pIIISCD, however, seems to be working magic. I popped a 667mhz p-III chip in this board, went into the bios, and to my delight found the cpu bus frequency listed as one of the options. One thing that supermicro has never done well is support overclockers, their old 66mhz FSB boards (P6DKF) only had jumpers for the 75mhz frequency, and not 83mhz. Same deal in the P6DBS. You could go 66 or 100, but no where inbetween or above. It was pure torture running my P-II 400 at 400mhz for two years. In the new SCD board, i was able to go all the way up to 160mhz (cpu speed of 800mhz) WITHOUT increasing the cpu voltage, and linux compiled the 2.4-test5 kernel fine. (the standard test to see if your system is stable). Unfortunately, the PC-133 ram i had in it wasn't quite up to the job and it would only POST once every two or three tries. It now runs flawlessly at the next step down. The bios has all the usual CPU temp / core voltage / other useful frills i've come to expect from supermicro.
The only gripe I have about the board is that due to the onboard audio, Supermicro expected you to use it since they didn't provide ISA slots for my old SB cards. Unfortunately, linux doesn't have support for this onboard sound yet, so i was forced to purchase an SB-live PCI. Other than that, the board has performed well beyond its specifications :)
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 140
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Epinions.com ID:
Forque
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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