| 7BW Intel 810 Baby AT Motherboard |
 7BW
Motherboard
Manufacturer
- Superpower
Tuesday, October 05, 1999 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium II Mendocino 400 Mhz 370 PPGA
64 Mb PC 100 SDRAM
Software used
Windows 98 build 4.10.1998
DirectX 7.x
General
The 7BW is a 370 Pin PPGA Based Baby-AT mainboard with Intel 810 '
Whitney' chipset.
Package is
bundled with a Driver CD, cables and manual.
The profile
Recently we got acquainted
with a company called SuperPower. Our last review was on their Via
Apollo Pro 133 Mhz motherboard the 6XV-133. This time we will be
looking at one of their integrated motherboard solutions the ' 7BW '
This motherboard is based upon the Intel 810 (DC-100) and has 2d/3d
videocard and sound solutions included in this chipset. The version of
the mobo we received is based up-on a Baby AT form factor solution.
The motherboard also has very up-to-date features like a Ultra DMA 66,
AMR and USB devices. The mobo does not have ISA slots anymore, no AGP
slot but only has 3 PCI slots.
The review on this
mobo will be deeply based upon benchmarks due to the nature of
integrated graphics and sound solution of this motherboard. We will
compare the power of this chipset to other chipsets and integrated
mobo solutions.
Who is
Whitney ?
You've all heard the
name Whitney floating around in tech land before. Whitney is simply
the codename for Intel's 810 chipset. As you probably have noticed,
the i810 motherboards will not come with an AGP-slot die to the
integrated nature of the mobo. Unfortunately this means that you can
only upgrade the to another graphics solution if you insert a PCI
graphics card. (you can choose to use PCI graphics in the bios).
However, a PCI graphics solution ... well those days are pretty much
over. The best at this time is a Voodoo3 2000 solution.
One other thing that
you will notice on the mobo are the missing ISA ports. So if you have
a lot of older 16Bit ISA cards then this mobo is a big nono to you.
Personally I think that ISA is something of the past, and I'm very
happy to see that it has been slowly replaced by newer and faster port
solutions like PCI, AGP and USB.
Another new feature
that comes with the i810 (and soon to be review i820) is the AC97.
This 'port' does not need much more then a external modem/audio
solution which should cost you no more then 5 to 15 dollar. However, i have to
warn you of a big disadvantage here! These devices are nowhere to be
compared with traditional devices. AC97 is based
up-on a codec. That means that your OS will emulate a modem or
soundcard. This of course will result in a heavy CPU load. Why did Intel
choose for this solution ? Well, in my opinion, there couldn't be a
better way for Intel to sell solutions that need high performance
CPU's. In other words, Intel makes sure that you need to buy a fast
CPU for optimal performance.
Coming up: the
motherboard review continued
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