Low cost alternative to N-force boards
Written: Nov 20 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Low cost, stable, good documentation and driver disk.
Cons: None.
The Bottom Line: Excellent choice for a student, family, or business machine.
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| brucedunn's Full Review: Elitegroup K7SEM Motherboard |
The board is a small, micro-ATX which has only two PCI and one AGP slots. It fits however in a standard ATX case, with the connectors and ports going through the standard holes. Video, sound, LAN are all onboard, although the onboard devices can be bypassed and cards used if desired. The whole chipset including north and south bridges, video, sound and LAN are in a single integrated circuit on the board, which has a modest heat sink but no fan. My retailer also offered me a modem for $10 which would fit in the AMR slot also provided on the machine - another saving if a modem is needed. One serial port is available - I was able to use it to successfully install a legacy mouse.
In comparison with boards based on the Nvidea N-force chipset, this board will have lower performance with a given processor. However, it is less than half the cost. The board is an excellent basis for an inexpensive family or student computer, or with a good added video card, a games machine. In keeping with the target market, it uses standard PC 133 RAM (or recycled PC100 RAM from an older machine). There is no provision for overclocking or processor voltage adjustments, so there is no opportunity to save money by buying a slower processor in the hopes that it can be overclocked. Even so, an inexpensive K7SEM with a good processor might well beat an expensive N-Force board with a mid-line processor, for the same money. ECS is a little vague about which processors are supported - they claim to support all 100 Mz and "most 133 MHz" AMD processors, but aren't specific. If people are going to install their own video card, the superior onboard video of the N-force is not relevant.
The board was a pleasure to install. All required drivers including those for Windows 2000 were on a disk supplied with the machine, and XP drivers are available for download. Documentation was reasonable. The driver CD contained a a grab-bag of undocumented programs, many of the "try for 30 days and register" variety. Every thing worked as advertised - it is spooky to see a fully configured computer with no cards of any type installed. Having nothing to put in the PCI slots, I am glad that I only had to pay for 2, rather than the 5 in a standard ATX board. In addition to saving by not having to buy a video, sound and LAN card, I also saved by needing only a 250 watt power supply - with the savings elsewhere in the machine, I went for a name-brand, quiet supply certified by AMD for use with their processors. I now have a quite machine with only two fans in it - the power supply and the CPU cooler.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 71
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Epinions.com ID:
brucedunn
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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