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A Bit of My Experience With PCChips 810-LMR

This article was written in 2003. Looking back - my experience with this motherboard was on par with what the price was. When you buy cheap motherboard you cannot expect them to perform well just few years down the road and that's exactly what happened. Notwithstanding the constant change to CPU sockets that make motherboards of last year obsolete. Having said that, here is the article:

In the past year or so I have built several computers based around this motherboard. I’ve had overall good experience with this motherboard, and I would like to share some of the points that I came across while deploying it.

What You Get

In the name of this motherboard, “LMR” stands for LAN & Modem Raiser. What this means is that for the price of this motherboard you get an onboard soundcard, an onboard 10/100 Mbps ethernet card with RJ 45 connector and a modem raiser card with 56K V.90 fax & modem. This motherboard is also equipped with an onboard shared-memory video card. It is a small form ATX motherboard so it fits in even the smallest of cases. For a system builder, this is a great way to provide an inexpensive, highly functional solution. The M810LMR motherboard supports Duron and Athlon chips 500MHz through 1.2GHz and up to 1GB PC133 SDRAM.

The way the shared memory works is that some of the installed PC100 or PC133 memory is allocated for the onboard video controller, technically lowering the amount of available memory to the operating system. Furthermore, the onboard controller will be reading from the memory each refresh cycle, so available memory bandwidth will be compromised. If you are interested mainly in simple functionality, this system will suffice. However, if you want to, for example, battle aliens on your system in flawless 3D movie quality animation backdrop, you will require a heck of a lot more speed. Installing even the least advanced AGP video card will greatly improve the speed at which the processor is able to access the DIMMs. This motherboard is not meant to be a high performance system in the first place, so you might want to consider a more expensive alternative. Also, if you plan on installing more than two PCI cards, this motherboard will not do.

The Driver Headache, Or Not The Driver Headache

I had a few problems with the drivers on Windows 2000. It seems that installing the drivers by reading the info files does not work very well, but don't despair. If you pop in the original CD that comes with the motherboard and let it install the drivers, everything will be configured correctly. The installation will ask you few times to reboot the system, but it is a painless way of installing a virtual COM3 for the AMR card so that your modem can be detected in next reboot. The video card, virtual COM3, modem and onboard LAN Ethernet will then be installed correctly.

The motherboard driver CD gives you a bunch of software. Among those included are Gamut 2000, MediaRing Talk, SuperVoice, WinDVD 2000 by Intervideo, PC-Cillin antivirus and Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 (this might just be the most useful piece of software on the CD). You will not get an activation key for winDVD2000 with this motherboard. The activation key is included with another type of motherboard with a more advanced sound and video system. As for antivirus needs, PC-Cillin is good, however, I prefer AVG from Grisoft. This list of software is based on version V7.78B of SystemBoard PC133 installation CD.

That Thing They Didn't Tell You

There is one more thing to mention – the speed of RAM. The system accepts CPUs that run on 100 or 133 MHz bus. If you run on 133 MHz bus, you need PC133 memory. If you run on 100 MHz bus, you can install either PC100 or PC133. You can set the speed of memory in the BIOS setup. Furthermore, you can change the bus speed in the BIOS setup. Most of the CPUs do not allow you to make a change in multiplier, but you can change the speed of bus. I do not suggest this board for overclocking, however, with good cooling you could bring some of the chips up to 133 from 100 MHz bus without a problem.

As always - overclocking is BAD when you try to sell the system. Your customer will most likely put the computer in a confined space so that no matter how many additional fans you put in, the system will overheat and the OS will crash and you will find yourself called in to fix it (again, and again, and again, and AGAIN.)

If you overclock your own computer and have it placed right by the air conditioning unit and don't mind if your system crashes from time to time, this board will step up by 33% the speed of your CPU. Then again, if you want to get more juice out of your CPU, you’ll simply have to go get a better board.