Tuesday, August 22, 2000

Introduction

The CS35-EC motherboard from DFI is a microATX form-factor board based upon the i815E chipset from Intel. As you may recall, the i815E set includes the ICH2 chip, and is thus able to offer support for such niceties as IDE ATA100, and PC133 memory. The CS35-EC also possesses an incorporated AC"97 sound-card, and AGP 3D video card, thus making it an ideal solution for assemblers, or inexpensive beginner systems. That said, let's take a look at what the CS35-EC has to offer.

The features

The CS35-EC is expandable via its 2 PCI slots, single AGP port, and CNR slot; sorry, no ISA slots to be found here! There are also the requisite 3 168-pin DIMM sockets for memory expansion, which can support upto 512MB of PC100, or PC133 SDRAM. Quite a few people may be surprised by the rather lightweight expansion possibilities that are provided, but it does seem in-line with a product destined for an assembly line, or a low-cost internet appliance where an all-in-one design is an advantage, rather than a drawback.

Configuration of the CS35-EC is accomplished, for the most part, from within the BIOS, as there are only two jumpers - JP9, and JP10 - that are immediately related to the CPU itself. For their part, they can be used to force the Front-Side Bus to operate at 66MHz, 100MHz, or 133MHz, or allow the setting to be determined automatically by the system. The rest of setup is accomplished from within the BIOS menu labeled "Frequency/Voltage Control", where it becomes possible to change the bus frequency, or the clock multiplier. Among the FSB settings available, setting JP9 & JP10 to 66MHz allows: 66MHz 68MHz, 70MHz, 75MHz, 78MHz, and 80MHz. A jumper setting of 100MHz allows for: 100MHz, 105MHz, 110MHz, 114MHz, 117MHz, 122MHz, 127MHz, and 129MHz. Finally, a jumper setting of 133MHz allows the user a selection of choices that includes: 133MHz, 140MHz, 144MHz, 146MHz, 150MHz, 157MHz, 160MHz, and 166MHz.

Unfortunately, there are no options provided to allow the adjustment of either the processor's Vcore or Vio voltages.

Next: Additional features.