ASROCK K7S8X SiS 746FX Mainboard Review (8)
Overclocker 1 Mar 2003

We spent almost 1 week testing this board with various BIOS revisions from ver 1.25 to 1.29c. In our tests, the ASROCK K7S8X based on the SiS 746FX does provide the stability that users are expecting as it uses probably lower ram timings for maximum compatibility (can't be adjusted through BIOS). As we can see from the benchmarks, the ASROCK K7S8X is a serious contender to the other chipsets. From most of the tests, we can see that it has overtaken VIA KT400 and is now a direct competitor to the nVIDIA nForce2. Although it is not the fastest board available right now, it poses a challenge to the nForce2 board especially in terms of content creation and business applications. In comparison with the Ref board and ECS L7S7A2, the performance does have room for improvement. The potential is there and we are looking forward to BIOS that resolves those ram timing and making ram CAS timings and settings available for us to tweak on our own.

From what I can see, ASROCK K7S8X seems to be aimed at the System Integrators as it has the minimum feature set that is probably good enough for low cost machines. It comes with max of 6 USB 2.0ports, 5.1ch audio, LAN. If you are thinking of overclocking this board, it does provide a wide range of FSB up to 248Mhz. Although you have this large range of fsb, this board does not come with an option for FIX PCI/AGP. It dose not come with Multiplier control, ram timing option and voltage tweaking (vcore, vdimm). The challenge is there if you decide to modify the CPU and the board for multiplier and voltage settings. We tried to overclock the board using a 2400+ (wire mod to 7.5x multiplier), the max FSB we can reach is 185mhz before HDD goes corrupted (no PCI/AGP FIX issue).

In our tests, we noticed that the chipset's heatsink is a bit warm and the voltage levels in hardware monitor a bit on the low side. This is important because if voltage levels drops too low, system stability might be compromised. We have fed back our concerns to Asrock and we hope to see an update BIOS that will resolve the bugs in the current BIOS implementations.

The ASRock K7S8X is currently on sale in most regions.
In UK,  it is priced at £46 inc vat or ~ USD 74.00

(Related Reviews/Galleries : SiS 746FX Ref Board, ECS L7S7A SiS746 Mainboard, Iwill K7S2 Gallery)

Discuss

Pros 好处:

(C) Copyright 1998-2009 OCWorkbench.com