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The Bios
 
The AK76-SN
comes equipped with the standard Award Bios. At first
glance, there isn't too much to set this apart from previous
Bios', but there are a few features that were nice to see.
For this reviewer one thing that stands out is the presence
of an AGP aperture setting.
A Few months
back we took a look at an i815EP board, the
DFI CS-60-EC.
One notable surprise was the fact that there was no AGP
aperture setting available in the Bios. With the
AK76-SN, the AGP aperture setting is available along with
four other settings that offer a good amount of flexibility
with AGP settings.
For the user who
doesn't want to fumble around in their computer, setting
DIP-switches and modifying their processor to achieve higher overclocks, all is OK.
The BIOS still provides the ability to adjust the bus speed
up to 166MHz. However,
if you are really reaching the higher bus speeds and need to
adjust the voltages, back to the DIP-Switches you go.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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Pretty Nice... |
|
-
1000MHz AMD Athlon (T-Bird
- 7.5 X 133)
-
DFI AK76-SN Motherboard
-
256MB PC2100 Crucial DDR
RAM (2-2-2)
-
Gigabyte 64MB GeForce 3
Videocard
-
Western Digital WD300BB
30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
-
Sound Blaster Live Sound
Card,
-
AFREEY 56X CD-ROM
-
Windows ME
-
Direct X 8.0 and nVidia
reference drivers version 12.42
-
VIA 4-in-1 chipset drivers
version 4.32
-
Current AMD Chipset Drivers
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Benchmarks / Comparisons |
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Quake3 and Business
Winstone 2001... |
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Now comes the fun part.
We took the DFI AK76-SN and threw our usual battery of
tests at it to see how it handles the abuse. Through
out this round of testing, we will be comparing our results
to the MSI K7T266 Pro motherboard that the BigWop
reviewed a
few weeks back. Let us begin by running a quick
round of Quake 3 Arena at 640x480 in HQ mode...
Quake 3
Well it looks like the MSI board
has a steady lead when it comes to Quake 3 performance.
Both systems were used with the same core components, the
only difference being the motherboards. We see here a
whopping 13.6 FPS difference between the two test systems.
However, on the flip side of the coin, 160FPS is pretty darn
good.
Let's take a look and see how
the DFI performs with today's demanding business
applications. For this we've enlisted the services of
Business Winstone 2001 to give the AK76-SN a run at real
world business application performance. On to the
results...
Business
Winstone 2001
Well folks, this isn't shaping
up to be a fair fight now is it? We see a 8.8 Point
difference between the two boards. Let's move on to
some Content Creation testing and then we'll start
overclocking this bad-boy...
.gif)
CC Winstone, Sandra,
and the Rating |
