This is a typical M-ATX board with nothing unusual in the design. I tested it in several HTPC cases and found nothing that would limit its use in even the smallest case I tried. For the review I have it in my testing bench setup. A motherboard tray from a server system, a rack of 6 HDs of various sizes & types and a 550w PS. The installation went very easy, with the color coded pin headers being a nice addition. The system booted with no problems, recognizing the Raptor without having to load any drivers, letting me access the on board RAID controller with no problem. I set up the main drive (36gb Raptor) with Windows MCE along with 3x 250gb SATA drives in RAID 5. The onboard RAID software was easy to use and quite fast in setting up the array. I am impressed with the board layout and the manual that goes along with it. Setup and installation of the OS & drivers was a breeze.

The BIOS is the almost now standard Phoenix-Award BIOS with options for fine tuning the motherboard. But, as we will see, the options for overclocking are limited. Looking at the BIOS screens we find most of the standard options for controlling the onboard devices such as a multitude of Boot devices, LAN, power management, and PCI configuration.

Turning now to the screens giving access to the ever important OC items, we find a distinct lack of controls for voltage regulation. I opened the Frequency/Voltage Control screen hoping to find the numerous controls that were found on the ECS KN1-SLI Extreme. What I found was very disappointing from an OC’er point of view. There are only three options available on the screen. The CPU clock speed has an impressive 300+ Mhz range. Unfortunately without a way to adjust the voltage, this is mosly fluff. Next we come to the DRAM timing options. It does allow you to manage your timings to try and tweak the best results, but again, the lack of voltage control leaves this as just another pretty screen.

All in all, a disappointment to the enthusiast in me. Let’s make no mistake though, This board does what it is intended to do, and it does it well. I would just like to be able to control as much as possible… Hmmm, ya think I might have some unresolved issues from childhood?

The utilities CD contained the drivers for the onboard Intel(R) 945G & ICH7DH, Intel GMA950 Graphic Chipset, Intel® 82573L Gigabit LAN Controller chipset, VIA® VT6307 2x IEEE1394a ports, and the Realtek ALC880 8-channel audio CODEC. As this is a Viiv compliant motherboard, I downloaded both the latest Intel Viiv software and the latest version of the Intel QuickResume software. For a more comprehensive overview of the Intel Viiv initiative see our review of the MP945-VX here.