| Geeks.com Athlon 64 3000+ CPU/Motherboard Combo
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Installation:
This motherboard / CPU combination is going to be replacing an ASUS A7N8X-E motherboard / AMD Athlon XP2400+ combination that has been living in an Enermax CS-718 mid-tower case. As mentioned before, an ATI 9800 video card was installed along with the following items:
» 1 GB Ultra PC3200 DDR RAM (2x512)
» 2 40 GB Maxtor ATA 133 7200RPM hard drives
» NEC 8X DVD Burner
» Samsung 16X DVD-ROM
» Leadtek Winfast TV tuner card
» Multimedia internal card reader
» Enermax 460 Watt power supply
The physical size of the Biostar VIA K8M800 is about half that of the ASUS mother board it was replacing. Once the mother board stand offs were rearranged to match the new motherboard, installing such a small motherboard in such a big case was extremely easy.
Initially the system was booted up running on the onboard video and only the RAM, hard drives, and optical drives installed. I made a quick trip into the Award BIOS to load factory defaults and alter the boot order so it would boot off of an optical drive. Then I dropped my Windows XP Pro disk in the drive and performed a repair installation of the existing Windows installation. Once the repair installation of Windows XP was completed and Windows Update was complete, I loaded all the appropriate device drivers from the included driver/utility CD. Then I added in the Winfast TV Tuner card and internal card reader. After testing the onboard video, I later installed the ATI 9800 Pro as mentioned before. The whole process was done in a couple of hours and went smooth with no hang ups or glitches.
Software:
The driver/software disk has a lot on it. Not only does it have all of the needed device drivers, but several utilities and a manual as well.
 
The Smart Guardian software was installed and amazingly gave me the same temperature readings as the hardware probe I have mounted right along side of the CPU heat spreader. The fan RPM readings are not shown as I have the fans connected to a Sunbeam fan controller which reads the CPU fan turning at 2300 RPM when running at full speed.
The graphic interface of the Webspeeder overclocking utility was a little cheesy in my opinion, but the utility was pretty easy to use and I was able to easily overclock the CPU to 221MHz FSB speed. The chip may have more overclocking left in it, but this is as far as I have pushed it so far. This utility resides in the system tray.
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