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Review: Intel D845PEBT2

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 9 February 2003, 00:00 4.0

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qapt

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Bundle and Manual




Officially I can't comment on the bundle and manual since the board was supplied in 'white-box' fashion with just the bare board and a simple setup guide. No driver CD was a criminal ommision on the part of Intel since the driver set for the BT2 runs into the hundreds of megabytes, something I wasn't happy about downloading from their website since I'm a lowly dialup internet user. But since if you buy this board officially, you'll receive the driver CD, I can't hold it against them fully.

So without a box or manual, I can only make an educated guess that the presentation will be nothing special, just the usual Intel functional presentation including all cables needed to take advantage of the hardware on the board and an easy to read manual with all the information you'll need to get by and setup the board.

The BIOS is the usual awful (in my opinion) type used by Intel with the unintuitive layout and navigation method compared to the usual AWARD fare seen in the majority of motherboards that pass by my hands. Despite being a pain to navigate around, everything is present and correct and works properly including the HyperThreading support if you use a supporting processor.

What you wont find is any real set of enthusiast related settings such as voltage adjustment, memory setting adjustment, front side bus adjustment (although certain released Intel BIOS's for this board, shock horror, have a percentage adjustment of the front side bus on offer although no related voltage adjustment).

The board is Intel through and through in this department with only a selection of memory speeds available to tweak the performance of your system.

Also, in a supplied BIOS for review of the board, one of the afore mentioned BIOS's that give you a stone age option of overclocking your board via percentage adjustment, it loses DDR333 support making the board perform poorly against its peers. It's an issue that I'm now informed is fixed, but the board will be reviewed on the older BIOS with no overclocking support but working support for DDR333 memory to make the board perform well.

So how does it perform?