Azza 633X-AD DDR
If you recall our review of the MSI K7T Turbo, we had a long discussion about who the biggest mainboard manufacturers are. Without reiterating ourselves too much, we can conclude that the list hasn't changed much. In fact, the first four are still the first four (ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, ECS/Elitegroup), only their order is different. Obviously, Pro Team Computer Corp. is not in this "top list", but that doesn't change anything from our point of view. We have received their deluxe board for testing, we have tested it and...
... and were awed by the results. Not necessarily talking about pure performance here, though. What we are talking about is the whole story of the board, the whole package, our friends at Pro Team and all the rest. Although Pro Team is not the biggest by all means, they are the owners of the Azza brand (which in turn means they produce all Azza boards... in fact, you can reach their renewed site at www.azza.com.tw, which is well worth a look, especially because of the beautiful blonde woman on the logo :). There is a vote going on currently about dismissing her... vote to save her! :)). Azza boards are known for their feature rich package, decent design and great price and our victim, the Azza 633X-AD doesn't wander an inch off the path of its predecessors. But what board are we talking? Enter the 633X-AD!
The 633X-AD is based on VIA's Apollo Pro266 DDR chipset, supporting Pentium III and Celeron FC-PGA processors. The board supports DDR SDRAM memory, 1.5GB of it at the maximum. The board also boasts an on-board Dolby Digital 5.1 sound-chip, which is non-standard by all means. Actually, this is the reason why we were really interested in this board and contacted Azza (Pro Team) for a sample. The funny thing is, that in the end, this feature became one of the least compelling compared to others, but more on this later... the Azza 633X-AD offers the whole spectrum of overclocking features: you can set any FSB in 1MHz increments (from 66MHz to infinity, meaning 166MHz), alter the core voltage of the CPU (-0.2V to +0.4V, which is quite a wide range actually... using a new, cC0 stepping Celeron/Pentium III, the highest possible voltage this way is 2.1V, which is a LOT) and alter the multiplier (which really has no use, as all Intel production processors are multiplier locked since ages).
So, with a full-blown DDR setup and all these tweaking features, we really shouldn't be asking for more, right? Wrong! If you think you have seen a big mainboard package, you are also wrong! Azza calls the package the "Jumbo pack" and they have every reason to do so, as it is HUGE! Inside is Azza's Azza-UP front panel with USB and audio connections fitting into a single, 5.25 inch drive bay. Inside is the most current version of Mandrake Linux and StarOffice. Inside is VirtualDrive, a CD-ROM caching program (copying the contents of the CD to the HDD and creating a virtual CD-ROM drive to access it... as the HDD is at least 10 times faster than any CD-ROM, this could be a useful feature for frequent CD-ROM users). At last, but not least, inside is our board:
One of the first things that could draw attention is the set of DIP switches on the board. Yep, the 633X-AD is not fully jumperless (well, it is, but not dipswitchless :)). Some people disprefer solutions like this, while we were actually pleased. Why? If you overclock your CPU to an extent where you end up being unable to boot (this always happens when you are trying to find the absolute maximum of a given CPU and do not have three weeks to test MHz by MHz), you don't have to clear the CMOS deleting all your settings (and in case of this board, there are quite a few of them!), only change a few jumpers/DIP switches, reboot, reenter Setup and roll... the switches are used to alter the default FSB, available options are Auto, 66MHz, 100MHz and 133MHz. You can always overclock some more by entering Setup and adding any positive number (between 0-32MHz) to the selected default FSB speed.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
