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Motherboard Setup and BIOS Options

Installing the motherboard required a lot more use of the manual than I would have liked. As stated before, RAM cannot be installed or removed when a long AGP card is installed (such as the GeForce FX 5900 series). Also stated before, some large heatsinks will have problems getting installed onto the motherboard.

A few other issues cropped up when setting up the motherboard. At first, the back panel audio jacks did not work at all. After browsing through the manual for 15 minutes, it turns out that the audio headers on the motherboard were missing a jumper that would have enabled their usage. After looking through the box for another 5 minutes, it turns out the missing jumper was never provided. The only way to get the back panel working was to plug in the C-box audio cable.

The C-box, while pretty-looking from the front, is utter hell behind.

As you can see, there are a total of 6 cables sticking out from the PCB, many of which have very short cables. If you have a large case, many of the C-box features will not work, as the cables are only 12 inches long and would not be able to stretch from the external bays to the bottom of the motherboard where many of the pin headers are located.

Plugging in the case headers was also a hassle, as the pins on the motherboard were not properly marked, which meant that I needed to refer to the motherboard more than I wanted to. For those of you who refuse to use manuals, tough luck, you probably have no choice.

The manual itself had a few inconsistencies with the motherboard layout. According to the manual, the C-box firewire cable was supposed to plug into a header number C26; which would be fine if that header existed. It turns out you have to plug in the ACR firewire riser card, and plug the cable into the ACR’s internal header. Also, the Handigator only works if you plugged in the Wake-on-LAN cable, which is not mentioned in the manual in any way.

However, after getting over these problems, the rest of the setup was simple. Being a nForce2 motherboard, nVidia’s unified driver system automatically installs everything, and whatever was not part of the chipset was quickly installed by either Windows XP (flash card reader, Handigator), or was available on the CD (C-media sound system).

BIOS Overclocking Options

The Chaintech board has quite a few overclocking options, but keeps it simple by putting everything on a total of 2 menus. the Advanced Settings menu and the Frequency/Voltage menu.

As you can see, you cannot type in the FSB speed. To get up to 250 mhz, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom. The page down button does not work here, unfortunately.

The table below summarizes the settings you can change in the BIOS.

Overclocking

We didn’t play around too much with the motherboard, but we managed to overclock a new Athlon XP Thoroughbred 1800+ from the stock 1.53 GHz up to 2.26 GHz with a Volcano 9 (Coolmod!).