Written By:
Date Posted: April 26, 2002

The layout of this board is almost identical to its older sibling the KG7, and as such has inherited a few niggling drawbacks.

Plugging a graphics card in before filling in DIMM slot 4 can make for a bit of trouble, as the graphics card will prevent you from fully opening the slot, although I found I was still able to put the ram into place, albeit with a bit more effort.

Another strange placement, is the IRDA header. This is placed between the third and fourth PCI slots, so if you have a card that doesn't have a cut out in that area, and you are using that slot, then you can't use the header.

There's plenty of room around the CPU socket for those large HSF's, and again this board like so many others out there now has a HSF on the northbridge for added stability.

The position of the power connector is good, it's at the top and out of the way of everything else. Again, like the KG7, there is no onboard sound, so you will need a 3rd party sound card. Not a big deal really, most onboard sound is crap with one or two exceptions.

The IDE headers are located to the far right of the board about halfway up and are coloured green, with the ATA133 RAID coloured yellow and floppy header, lower down. This could cause problems to some, in that if you have a full tower case with the floppy drive at the top, you will need an extra long lead for it to reach. The whole layout of the board gives a very clean impression, and with exception of that 4th DIMM slot graphics card problem, and for some the floppy drive connector, it works very well.

The manual supplied was very well written, with only a few errors in translation, but nothing that could cause you untoward problems, with lots of images and diagrams that make installing this board a breeze. The board also came with a floppy cable, 2 x ATA100 IDE cables, as well as a further 2 IDE cables for the Raid connectors, driver and anti-virus software, as well as the latest Bios revision installed too.

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