Hardware Report : Li-Sell Biostar NF325-A7 / Athlon64 2800 / 1gig Ram / 6600 GT OC In : Mepis Linux 7 Final by : je.saist Okay, here we go with a unit that is up for sale... so I may or may not have this unit in the future. It's a basic solid box, housed in a Thermaltake Bach chassis. The main processor fan is one of Thermaltake's K8-Silent's, and the chassis two 60mm fans have been swapped out for less noisy Dynatron / Rexus Top Motor varients. So it's relatively quiet... right up until the Geforce kicks in. Sadly, the fan mountings on the AGP 6600 GT's don't give me a lot of options to work with. Anyways, the OS is Mepis 7 final, so lets see what we got.  Motherboard: The Motherboard is Biostar's NF325-A7 motherboard. A pretty solid board with no major complaints. Unfortunantly, the back plate for this motherboard wasn't present when I got it... I did notice that somebody had been thinking ahead, even on this motherboard. The AGP slot is actually given two slots worth of space, useful when many of the higher end AGP cards were coming with dual slot coolers. Other points of good engineering as the placement of the two power cords right next to each other, which can help with cabling in smaller cases.  Processor: The processor in use is the Athlon64 2800+. This particular processor does have some overclocking potential as I've gotten it up to 2.3ghz on a Zalman 120mm copper heatsink. Granted, that wasn't with this motherboard, or the current heatsink. Currently the system will run reliably with a 2ghz clock speed, which was all I was willing to test up to.  Power Control: Like most Nvidia Nforce motherboards, power control is fully operational.  When you need it, the performance is there.  Network: No problems with the onboard network.  Memory: The memory is a single gigabyte stick from OSZ's Platinum series. Socket 754 processors are single channel memory only, but there is room for an extra stick of memory for those who would like a little bit more space.  Granted, unlike Vista or Windows Xp, Linux is quite fine running on just a gig of memory.  Storage: As can be expected from an Nforce3 chipset, no problems with storage.  USB: Not that there's anything that could go wrong with the Nforce3's USB support...  Sound: Yes, a system without a Via-Envy chipset... this system runs on integrated sound only. I do have other sound cards around that could be added, but honestly the sound quality is pretty much the same between most cheap-add in cards and Nvidia's choices for sound solutions.  X-Server: Sometimes i question why I show this screen...  Since all people really want to know is what the system can do. Well, it's a 6600 GT OC, which means this card came overclocked out of the factory. It's not the latest and greatest by today's standards, but it will run Call of Duty 4.  Surprisingly, although I didn't show it, PowerMizer was also active for this card. Anyways, here we can see that the Bus is running on AGP 8x, and the specific version of the card.  And as Cedega confirms, everything is working properly.  However... this is an Nvidia card. Just because tests say it works... doesn't mean it actually works. Yes, I can average 30fps in City of Heroes on 1280*1024 with medium detail levels.  Take me back to the Guides |