Good motherboard for the experienced user
Written: Apr 20 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Inexpensive, good quality
Cons: Manual is terrible, older board, for experienced users
The Bottom Line: For the experienced user only, inexperienced or average users stay away.
Reviewed Tekram Socket 7 as well
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| gryphonsclaw's Full Review: Tekram P6 BX-AN |
I have always liked Tekram boards, they are inexpensive and built good. Tekram or ASUS are the boards that I like to sell. Then I remembered that I have more experience and resources available to me because of working at a computer repair shop. I normally don't deal with Tekram instead I return the board to the distributor. I would recommend returning a defective product to the place you bought it in the first place, I think you will be okay with warranty issues if you do that. Tekram provides retailers with 2 yr warranties, so there shouldn't be a problem.
I have worked with Tekram boards for almost 4 years now. I would like to state a bit about some of their other boards in case you are looking to buy them (mainly the socket 7 which, no opinion is offered for on eopinion). The socket 7's like many other manufacturer's boards were built cheap. The capacitors on them were too small and in many cases blew after time because they couldn't handle the constant power draw. I saw about 1 out of every 6 boards have this problem, two of caps to the upper-right of the processor. I have seen Epox boards do this too. Now, it is fixable for I soldered a larger, higher quality cap to the board and the board ran for a year straight and now sits in my closet waiting for another system. I don't think you want to do this though. Therefore, I would stay away from Tekram socket 7's, ie the K6-2/3 line. The other problem that they had was some K6-2 processors had errors running at the 100Mhz bus. Stay away from these boards, I recommend an Abit or ASUS
Now as for the BX chipset, that has been a quality board. The caps are bigger, and I have not seen them blow. It is a good inexpensive board that will hold up and I have not seen the normal conflicts as with other boards. Now, remember that a poor peripheral will make a board look bad. I have a SCSI card that won't work with anything.
Another plus is with an Intel BX chipset there are very few jumpers, clock, voltage and bus are controlled in the BIOS. Its been a while since I worked with one so I do not remember how easy they are to over clock, I think you may need another addon to step up voltage.
What's good
The board is built well and inexpensive.
The board has all the features you need for a PII or PIII. AGP 2X, 5 PCI, 2 USB, 133Mhz bus, 768MB max RAM, Hardware Monitor, and a FULL BIOS, I hate when manufacturers strip the BIOS, ie. take out options.
Problems
The book is labeled wrong and things like power and PC Speaker are different pins than what the book says. The board is labeled right. Now whether you can blow up a motherboard by hooking the soft power up wrong, I have never done it, guess it depends if the switch on the case is polarity sensitive. My worst one was the PC Speaker, took me an hour to figure that one out :O(
The built on sound is horrible. It will cut out and blip when other applications under windows are run. This is even true after assigning it an IRQ value in the BIOS. I always stay away from on-board peripherals, for they fail more often and don't offer the same quality. I would recommend a good sound card such as an inexpensive Yahmaha for $10 if you want cheap sound. The sound does disable easily.
Final Opinion
If you can live with out the book, go ahead and get this board, especially if you want to add a different sound card anyway, such as a SB Live. If you are uncertain as to how to jumper a motherboard or don't feel confident in your ability don't get this board.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 85
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Epinions.com ID:
gryphonsclaw
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Location: Oregon/ Wyoming
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
Student in the MIS field, work as a Web Admin, enjoy computers and nature.
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