Review of the DFI CB61 mainboard

Friday, February 18, 2000

Introduction

Asides from a few, small differences, the DFI CB61 motherboard is nearly identical to the CA61 from the same manufacturer. In fact, one finds that the CB61 has the same essential functionality, and feature set as does the CA61. The differences that truly distinguish one from the other, are:

  • The CB61 implements the Intel 440BX chipset, rather than the VIA Apollo Pro 133

  • The CB61 does not support ATA66 drives; despite the fact that the BIOS identifies them correctly.

  • The CB61 does not support PC133 memory, and does not posess a BIOS function to that same effect.

  • The bus frequency of the CB61 is limited to 100Mhz.


    • As for everything else, the CB61 stands as a perfect twin of the CA61. That said, let's now take a look at the board itself.



    The features

    Much as did the CA61, the CB61 sports 4 PCI slots, 3 ISA slots, and a single AGP port. As to memory, the CB61 features 3 168-pin DIMM sockets, that can support upto 768MB of memory.

    Configuration of the CB61 is accomplished, much like its twin, via a set of functions in the BIOS, supported by a series of DIP switches, and jumpers on the board itself. Among the jumpers one finds are JP7, which allows the choice of Cyrix, or Intel processors, and JP2/JP4 which permit one to choose between 66Mhz, and 100Mhz as the main bus frequency. The set of DIPs labeled SW1 permit the selection of a clock multiplier, but as Intel processors now ignore this function, it may not prove very useful. A function within the BIOS allows the main bus frequency to be modified between selections(even if this setting is limited to 100Mhz by default; unlike the CA61 which can go just as high as 133Mhz), including: 66Mhz, 75Mhz, 83.5Mhz, 100Mhz, 103Mhz, 105Mhz, 110Mhz, 112Mhz, 115Mhz, 120Mhz, 124Mhz, 133Mhz, 140Mhz, and 150Mhz, with clock multipliers of 3X to 8X in steps of 0.5X.



    Next: The features(continued).