When my business was first looking for a way to deliver rock-solid business workstations to our customers, we decided to try out the Intel CA810 line of motherboards. Standardizing on them for this market was one of the best hardware choices we've ever made. We've delivered dozens of systems based on this platform, and each one has been wonderfully stable and a pleasure to work with.

From the physical side, the board is great to deal with. It's a microATX board, and it fits beautifully into every ATX case we've tried, including several FoxConn and InWin offerings. The locations of the power connector, DIMM slots, ribbon cable connectors, etc. are intelligent, making installation a breeze. And, although this next comment is subjective, the board just looks and feels like a well manufactured, high quality product.

From the software side, the BIOS on this board autodetects CPU (both type and speed), memory, floppy, and IDE devices. Provided you use the proper cabling (provided), ATA/66 drives are correctly recognized and utilized as such. In fact, outside of setting the real-time clock on first boot-up, there is little else that needs to be done with the BIOS.

So, in a sense, this is one motherboard you can take out of the box, install, and be ready to go in minutes, not hours, with a minimum of effort.

And, once you get the install done, this board will run flawlessly. We have some systems that have been running 24x7 for months on this platform, and there has never been anything even closely related to a glitch. We have NT and Unix (FreeBSD) servers on the platform, and it really has been totally reliable.

On the other hand, the board is targeted to the entry-level home PC market, and if you're happy with the integrated Video, Audio, and LAN, then this board really is an excellent deal. However, you should know what you're getting, because the board is not very expandable (only 4 PCI and no ISA slots, and only two DIMM slots. Not even an AGP slot!). In particular, a few things keep me from recommending this as a "power user" board:

1) The Audio quality is decent, but the card does not truly support full-duplex operation. If you are into recording digital audio, this can be a serious drag.

2) The Video boasts "3D Acceleration", but don't expect too much. An older Voodoo2 card will blast past the 810 graphics chipset without too much effort in terms of 3D rendering performance

3) Performance is average. It's not bad, but we have a couple of identically configured systems build on ABIT BH6s that consitently perform about 10-20% better - although a little less reliably.

The LAN card is real decent, though, and for a basic 10/100 ethernet interface, I've seen no drawbacks.

So, in summary - a really great product for the average business desktop or home user, or for a lower-end server, but not the best choice for expandability, especially if you don't want the audio and video you get with the product.





Recommended: Yes