|
Posted by
Toby
Crundwell on March 20, 2002
Company: EliteGroup
Product: L4S5A
Socket 478 motherboard
Look
for the lowest motherboard
prices.
After getting all essential components
ready, including a rather awkward installation of the stock
HSF given the capacitors to the left of the board, the real
first problem I ran into was that my case didn't like the
motherboard. It just didn't fit properly, and the board
would bow unless I took all but three of the supports out.
This meant I had to by a new case. In any case (pun not
intended), my 250 Watt power supply, which had got me
through nine systems in the past two years, was not Pentium
4 approved, so that had to go as well. £70 later and the
system was all set to run perfectly, and it
did...eventually. I usually like to see a three pin fan
connector near the AGP port for use on my video card cooler,
but ECS did not include this. Fan connectors were not
absent; there were two auxiliary connectors, just not in the
right place. Splicing and adding some copper bi-wire
extended the cable enough to reach the nearest connector,
opposite PCI slot four. The vertically mounted DIMM slots
were so near the AGP slot that memory in two of the three
slots cannot be removed whilst I had a Titan 2 Ultra
installed.
As mentioned before, the backing panel
for I/O was not supplied. This is unfortunate, as the I/O
layout is very unusual. Apart from having only one serial
port, the two USB ports are moved away from their customary
position below the PS/2 ports to below the sound & midi
connectors. This has the effect of making the parallel,
serial and sound & midi out of place, and another
backing panel cannot be used. This wouldn't matter for some,
but it has the effect of ruining airflow on a good designed
case (contrary to popular belief it is advised to keep the
case closed with all unnecessary air holes blocked, so that
the strength of the airflow will be greatest from the bottom
right of the case to the top left.
I had a couple of non-starts but a after
removing the Hollywood plus VGA pass-through and reattaching
the DSUB to the primary video card, POST presented itself.
The L4S5A still doesn't seem to like using the Hollywood
Plus VGA pass-through for posting, I'm not sure why. In any
case, after rectifying these problems I could enter the
BIOS. Most values were sensible, and IDE drives were
automatically detected first time. Booting up, and all
necessary drivers were installed without issue. Unlike Via
4in1 chipset drivers, SiS only supply AGP drivers. This
shouldn't really cause many problems, as Windows just uses
default drivers. I got a couple of stability issues early
on, not too common, but the system just couldn't take long
periods of intensive use (game playing mostly). Changing
BIOS settings to more conservative settings, including
setting the memory to run at 100 (200) Mhz despite the fact
it can run at 150 (300) MHz, gave stability, but predictably
performance was rather reduced. The system wasn't exactly
overheating, the CPU temperature was reported at 43 under
load, and there was extra cooling in the form of two
side-mounted 120mm fans. I could use the system without
experiencing any crashes, despite intensive use at times. It
is possible that the motherboard didn't get on too well with
the memory I was using; this was one component I could not
replace. The memory module was perfectly stable with other
AMD systems though.
DDR is becoming something of an industry
buzzword, surrounded by hype. The technology serves to
deliver data on both sides of a cycle. Traditionally, to
transfer a piece of data (either 0 or 1) would take one
whole clock cycle, measured in Hertz (Hz). DDR allows data
to be transferred on the falling edge of the cycle, thereby
doubling the throughput. However the number of cycles (Hz)
remains the same. DDR-SDRAM is available from 100Mhz to
166Mhz (PC1600 - PC2700)
The new DDR versions of this memory are
not sold on clock cycles as SDR memory is, but instead by
the bandwidth as PC1600, PC2100, PC2400 & PC2600. This
measurement can be worked out by multiplying the effective
frequency (200-333) by the binary digits (64) and dividing
the end result by the number of bits per byte (8). All of
which leaves us wanting to call it PC200, PC266, PC300 or
PC333. Still, at least ECS refer to PC2600 as PC333. Which
could either clear things up or just end up confusing more
people.
The L4S5A features three DDR DIMM slots
for PC1600 - PC2600. The frequency cannot be changed to more
than this, unlike rival AMD board based on the KT266a
chipset. The problem with the new standards is the
expectation. DDR memory will speed up your system, but not
by gigantic amounts, especially on Intel systems. The
difference between systems running PC133 & PC1600 is not
noticeable, but higher clocked RD memory is renowned has a
noticeable performance increase over DDR memory on the SiS
645 chipset.
The L4S5A supports mPGA Socket 478
central processors up to 2Ghz using the Northwood core. The
"400Mhz" bit so often pimped by Intel &
motherboard manufacturers refers to the quad-pumped bus (AMD
CPUs are dual pumped). According to Max
Cogwill: "The theory behind the deeply-pipelined
and highly superscalar Netburst architecture design coupled
with the quad-pumped bus and the high bandwidth it provides,
is that future applications are going to require several
instructions being executed at once and manipulating large
amounts of data. Thus the term streaming applications. While
this may or may not be true, this design usually hinders
current apps that are not as bandwidth-intensive and do not
require multiple instructions to be executed at one
time."
|
