The first thing you may notice about this board is it's name, Fatal1ty. This don't make the board any more special just that the world class gamer Fatal1ty has teamed up with some companies to put his name on it.
Due to the fact I don't like spending much on motherboards I bought this 2nd hand and very impressed by it so far.
What’s in the box ?
You should obviously get the motherboard itself and all the usual cables/manuals/cd's and a guru control panel. The guru control panel is a basically a panel that fits in one of your CDROM bays and has functions on it to allow you to ..
Monitor system Monitor overclock features Reset CMOS Connect earphones and mic Connect 2 USB 2.0 devices Connect 1 IEEE 1394 device
It has an LCD display which you can monitor CPU speed, current time, temperature, fan speed, notification(blinks icons for email etc) and displays frequency and voltage.
So what you think !! - Well the difference with this is that you can overclock your pc while in game by using preset overclock features and monitor system performance while doing so, if it's struggling you can then switch back.
Don't be fooled by some reviews stating this has ATA - 150 support only, it actually supports Sata II on 4 channels which is ATA-150 compatible, the other 2 ports are ATA-133.
The motherboard uses Nforce Ultra chipset with a 6-channel audio via nForce4 integrated audio and ALC658 codec PCIE sound card.
The board itself should be bright red and lined with red led's that make it glow nicely if you are into that kind of thing in your case. It uses outside thermal exhaust system or OTES for short which is 2 fans and a casing around the port cluster to expel hot air.
~ Installation and Setup ~
Installation is straight forward as with any motherboard and the only tricky thing with this was setting up the Sata II HDD I bought. Apparently you have to use a floppy disk to setup Sata II but after fiddling about I managed to get passed and boot up without a floppy disk, I don't even have a floppy drive installed.
After that it was plain sailing, everything went smoothly unlike some other boards I've installed in the past. The bios is a little more tricky to setup than most as you can overclock a lot of options and mess your machine up if you don't know what you're doing.
One thing to note is that I thought the board is pretty well laid out, everything seems to be in a good place so installation of cables or add-on parts are easy to do.
You will notice that on the board itself there is a little counter that will flash with numbers and letters, these are boot up/running codes and if there is a problem at all it will display an error code. You can use the manual to find what the error code is and fix it
~ Usage ~
Been using this board for 5 months now and not a single problem with it, infact I don't it has even crashed. Being a bit of a gamer this board has proved to be of high quality but to be honest I have not over clocked anything yet. One thing that might be worth noting is that since installing this board my HDD failed and it didn't like my new HDD, it picked it up and installed Windows on it but reduced my pc to a 386 pace. It appears that the CMOS needed clearing in order for me to fit a new Sata II drive.
~ Price ~
Not wanting to spend much on a motherboard I bought mine 2nd hand for £50, looking around these boards seem to be selling for around £100.
~ Summary ~
Fantastic board with fantastic features but unfortunately I cannot compare it to motherboards in the £100 range as I don't normally buy them. This easily beats any of the Asus motherboards I have had in the past.
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Apr 26th, 2007
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