DEC Alpha 21264A 667 MHz processor board

Advantages: Many USB Ports, Firewire, 7.1 Audio, Very stable
Disadvantages: IDE placement, Firewire placement, on-board graphics

...This motherboard is practically perfect for me. I built an HTPC, and I needed it to have firewire, as well as a good audio system. This board, which is made for media center PCs, and accepts Core 2 Duo processors, is exactly that. The board did not have any problems loading- after everything was plugged in, boot went flawlessly. But alas, it is not perfect. Some layout was not designed very well. For example, the placement of the IDE header kind of impinges on the SATA headers. As well, the Firewire header is in between firewire slots- not very good if you have to stretch it from the front of your chassis. Also, the on-board graphics were useless. Intel might as well have made the board less expensive, and tossed the graphics. I have read some reviews that say 800 MHz RAM doesn't work very well with this system. I tried to stay away... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: The first portable super computer
Disadvantages: no more expansion bays

...Now - you must be wondering why you should buy a laptop for more than 2000 pounds with a chip speed of 667Mhz. Well - the answer is in the "G4" bit of the name. The Motorola G4 processor is the first processor to achieve preformance of more than 1 gigaflop sustained (1 billion floating point operations per second) - so it is technically a supercomputer. There are two flavours - 550Mhz and 667Mhz. Apart from the usual increase in RAM and HD, the 667 has a 133Mhz main bus as compared to 100 on the low end. As for shared specs, they really are quite juicy, sporting radeon graphics, DVD/CDRW slot-loading combo drives and a wonderful 15" widescreen display that is wonderful for DVD movies. It also has a good array of ports, with modem, 10/100/1000 (yes - gigabit) ethernet, USB 1.1, Firewire, IRda, s-video out, VGA out (with support... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Fast, Really Fast
Disadvantages: Noisy

...Processor Is Fairly Fast, But Over Heating , Even With Original Intel Cooling Is A Regular Problem. It Don't Seem To Work Well With My MSI NEO2 Motherboard. The Huge Cooling Fan Makes A Lot Of Noise And Vibration. After Changing The Thermal Gel The Vibration Is Lot Less Now. But Every Time I Put Up A Huge Processing Task The Processor Fan Speeds Up And The Vibration Returns. My 533MHz DDR2 RAM Works Fairly Well With The Processor. The Motherboard Though Support 667MHz RAM As Well. I Have Tested Once With A 667MHz 512MB RAM And The Performance Boost Is Quite Insignificant. Have Put It Through A Mega Processing Task. I Put That Exact Task on A PIII 800MHz With Same Amount of RAM and The Required Time For The Later Was A Multiple of 6(almost). The Duel Core Really Works.... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful