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Posted by
Toby Crundwell
on November 30, 2001
Company: Soyo
Product: K7V
Dragon Plus motherboard
Find
low Motherboard
prices here.
Z-Box
Personal security seems to be coming
back into fashion. Back in the days of the 486, Keylocks
were fairly commonplace, at least on some PCs. This was a
lock which effectively, when locked, gave logic one on the
keylock connection and disabled the motherboard from
unauthorised usage. The main disadvantage of this is that
someone who knew about these workings could easily just open
up the pc and remove the connection to the keylock.
MSI introduced their own form of
security in the USB smart key, which effectively stores a
password on a USB device, which the BIOS will check before
completing POST. The USB key can be put on a key ring when
the computer is not in use.
Soyo's offering at personal security is
a PC Smart Card reader (PC/SC). This comes in a 3 1/2"
drive bay that can also be used in a 5 1/4" drive bay
with the addition of an (included) caddy. The drive bay,
aside from the SCR slot, also houses two USB ports (useful
for those who find themselves frequently adding or removing
USB devices) and a slot for GSM SIM cards. The latter is
present should your phone book from your Cell phone to your
PC.
The smart card does seem rather simple
(and possibly easily forged), but is effective and can be
used easily with the software Soyo supply on the driver CD.
However it is still not fundamental to the system security,
and unlike the smartkey will not stop booting right at post
if it is not present. This will disappoint some but
shouldn't bother most of you, as in my opinion if you want
that level of security you might as well enforce a system
password from the BIOS.
More details of the Z-Box can be found
at Soyo's website.
Overclocking
The "retro" Award 6.0PG BIOS
may not as easy to navigate as the newer Medallion BIOSes,
but was no less feature packed. Notably, it allowed 1Mhz
increments for FSB overclocking, CPU voltage options of up
to +0.1z (giving up to 1.95v) and an option for
"maximum system performance". With the system set
to "Turbo performance", the FSB could be
overclocked to 115 MHz. Windows would load at speeds past
113 MHz, but games would not play correctly. Changing this
setting to "normal" yielded much better results.
With "turbo" disabled and CAS latencies reduced
the system was stable at 125 MHz. The Athlon 850 was running
at 1068 MHz and the PC2400 memory at 158 MHz.
This was all only with minimal air
cooling.
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