Installation

The installation of this motherboard was very straightforward and easy. In fact it was extremely easy in this case as I had just removed an Asus A8N32-SLI deluxe board from my case and had left the board standoffs in place. Except for this board being slightly shorter, and thus missing the last row of standoffs, the 4COre1333-eSATA has an identical hole layout as its ASUS “brother from a different mother”. As it is a short motherboard, even the most cramped of ATX compatible cases should have more than enough room for this board.

All the necessary cable connectors are clearly labeled on the motherboard and are explained in the manual. The only small and very minor annoyance was with the system panel headers, or to be more specific the power led 2 pin headers. On some cases this cable is a 3 pin connector that has the middle wire missing, but this motherboard requires the two pins to be next to each other. This is not too much of a pain since it is very easy to reposition one of pins so the 3 pin connector “hangs over” the edge of the headers. This may be an issue if you are inexperienced and/or this is your first build, since it can be tricky bending the plastic enough to remove the connector with out breaking it. Other than this minor issue, installation of the cables was very straight forward.

Installation of the Windows XP was also trouble free and went very smoothly. All missing drivers were located on the CD and by simply inserting the CD into your drive bay and clicking on the various options that appear in the popup window everything was installed without a problem. One interesting thing is that unlike ASUS CD’s there was no “1 click” option that you could select and let the system install, reboot, install, reboot, etc all by itself. Rather, you had to select each option one at a time, and let the system reboot and then start the process all over again with the next driver. This was a little more hassle but certainly nothing major.

As this motherboard does not include an onboard graphics core the CD did not have any graphics drivers on it to install. Of course, since you are expected to provide your own graphics card this should not be considered an oversight. I have heard people complain about this in the past on other similarly priced boards and the short easy answer is “buy a board with built-in graphics if you want the motherboard manufacturer to include the drivers”. After all if they did include drivers for both Nvidia and/or ATI they would then be tacitly agreeing to support said graphics cards…for free.


A very nice feature is the inclusion of Realtek 7.1 High Definition Audio. This feature worked surprisingly well, but did produce some noticeable “crackling” interference noise. This noise was most pronounced during hard drive seek and reads. One could easily tell when the OS or other software was accessing the hard drive just by the static it produced in “surround sound”.

On the positive side, the included software is intuitive and easy to use. You simply choose the number of channels you wish to use, whether that is 2,4,6 or 8 and it graphically represents (in colour code) what connectors have to go where. The software even allows you to setup virtual soundstages, which does a credible job of simulating different size and types of environments when listened too via Zalman 5.1 headphones. Overall, the included 7.1 HD sound is a nice addition but certainly not in the same league as an aftermarket soundcard.