Friday, January 14, 2000

Introduction

The DFI PW65-E motherboard is among the first of a new breed of motherboards to employ the Intel 810 chipset. As such, the PW65-E incorporates both graphics, and sound cards. The PW65-E's graphics card is the DC133 AGP, capable of operating at 133Mhz, while the sound card is of the AC"97 variety.

The Features

The PW65-E is expandable via its 5 PCI slots, and AMR connector but no ISA slot or AGP port are supplied. Finally, 2 168-pin DIMM sockets allow for a maximum of 512MB of RAM to be installed.

Configuration of the PW65-E can effectively be said to be jumperless, as there are few jumpers to be seen. The principal jumpers that exist, are JP9, and JP10, which can be used to set the base frequency that will be used by the BIOS when determining bus speed. Available choices include: Automatic adjustment by the system, 66Mhz to 89Mhz - with an initial frequency of 66Mhz, 100Mhz to 133Mhz - with an initial setting of 100Mhz, and 133Mhz to 166Mhz - with a base frequency of 133Mhz. Another option found in the BIOS submenu labeled "Advanced Chipset Features", allow the operating frequency of the memory to be set to 100Mhz, or 133Mhz.

Available clock frequencies, according to the user's manual, include: 66Mhz, 72Mhz, 75Mhz, 83Mhz, 89Mhz, 100Mhz, 100Mhz, 107Mhz, 107Mhz, 110Mhz, 112Mhz, 114Mhz, 117Mhz, 119Mhz, 121Mhz, 124Mhz, 127Mhz, 130Mhz, 133Mhz, 140Mhz, 155Mhz, and 166Mhz, with clock muliplier of between 3X and 8X in steps of .5X.

Next: Additional Features.