|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Soltek SL-KT880E-RL
The Soltek SL-KT880E-RL is the first of the KT880 motherboards will be looking at. The KT880 is set to be the final chipset from VIA fro the socket A (Athlon XP) platform. Due to the release of the Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64 FX, the requirement for this platform is thinning out. However the main market is still with Athlon XP and so one more chipset should still be financially viable. The main difference in this chipset release is the dual channel memory bus. Twice the memory bandwidth of previous DDR400 chipsets. This will especially benefit users of heavy memory programs such as video editing and encoding. The Soltek SL-KT880E-RL has a very attractive look to it. A rather striking purple with yellow slots and ports. It will look very nice in a clear case with some LED's inside. The board comes with a standard 5 PCI slots for upgrade and 8 USB ports (4 on back panel and 4 by optional cable). 2 IDE ports with a capacity of 4 drives. A somewhat disappointing thing these days is the fact it only has the 2 S-ATA ports controlled by the south bridge. Most modern boards have a separate controller to handle another 2/4 ports. Due to this you are restricted in your RAID options to 0 or 1. RAID 0+1 is obviously not available due to the lack of S-ATA devices you can connect. Onboard we a 6 channel audio chip and a 10/100Mb LAN chip (RL version only) Again pretty standard these days as motherboard manufacturers are coming out with 7.1 onboard sound and gigabit LAN chips are also becoming common place. You do get a handy little overclocking utility called Redstorm. This utility lets you increase you FSB speed by 1Mhz increments from within windows.
Dual Channel Memory Bus The KT880 chipset comes complete with two independent memory controllers. This gives you twice the access bandwidth to the memory than before. The Duel Channel Memory Bus allows twice the data to be transferred per second than the previous DDR400 chipsets. AGP 8x Firstly it has AGP 8x support so you can fully utilize those latest graphics cards such as the Geforce FX and the Radeon 9800. This provides an AGP bus bandwidth of 2.1Gb/s instead of the 1.1Gb/s provided with the AGP 4x specification. With more and more complex textures coming into games the AGP bus speed is getting more and more important all the time as On-Card memory is not large enough to handle everything. DDR400 The current fastest memory available DDR400. DDR400 also known as PC3200. DDR400 provides a 200Mhz*2 memory system. Remember the days of PC100. In order to use the DDR400 memory at its full capacity you will need a CPU that supports 800Mhz FSB. USB 2.0 USB 2.0 is up to 40 times faster than the standard USB1.1 ports. This is great news if you are using external Hard Disks CD-Drives or scanning large pictures on a USB scanner. with 480Mbs transfer rate there will be no slow down is your USB transmission. Serial ATA Controller Serial ATA is the new way of connecting your Hard drives to your Motherboard. The current Serial ATA specification is ATA-150 (150Mb/s). The Soltek SL-KT880E-RL supports 2 S-ATA devices controlled by the south bridge. RAID is supported on these drives with RAID functions 0 and 1 available. You can learn more on RAID here.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| PantherProducts - Articles - Games Zone - Making Money Online - Product Reviews - Jargon Dictionary | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
