Another thing to take note of here
is the massive amount of capacitors adjacent to the CPU socket. I've seen
a few manufacturers skimp on these, and with a power hungry processor there
will surely be stability problems. Luckily Azza hasn't gone that route. The
board has two built in USB ports and can have two more added since there is
a connector on the motherboard to support them. Since it features on board
sound there are connectors for the sound in/out and a joystick. I'm going
to say something that I never thought I would say about a small manufacturer
like Azza: their board's layout is not only good, it matches the quality of
design I've seen from manufacturer's such as Abit, Asus, and Soyo. Wow, that's
the second comparison to Abit and Soyo! And it looks like Azzo's engineers
are listening to criticism from people like us since they've added a fifth
PCI slot. We criticized Azza for only having 4 PCI slots in the past on some
of their boards and voila there is a fifth one now. I'm beginning to wonder
if we could just dump the AMR slot and have a sixth PCI slot available? Before
I get too far on that tangent let me just point out that five PCI slots is
the current industry standard, and having that legacy ISA slot sure does help
with the occasional dinosaur component that needs to go in a system. Since
AMR components aren't available to the average consumer, and never were intended
to be, I'd like to see manufacturers dump them from their boards altogether.
The AMR slot looks to be the vestigial organ of the computer world - but at
least an appendix can be removed!
I'd
like to take a moment to point out that 3dfxCOOL
sent us the heatsink/fan unit used for testing with this board. The Socket-AHO
(Socket A High Output) was designed for Socket A from the get go. There are
far too many stories of people crushing their pretty new Socket A CPU because
they used a Socket370 heatsink on it. Bart Lane sells these units for only
$20 and you can't beat that price for such a large high-quality heatsink.
It even comes with a high output 60mm fan on top of it. The clip that holds
it on is AMD approved - which is insurance for those who don't want to make
a keychain out of their new CPU. Bart even has other Socket A stuff for your
overclocking pleasure so I recommend you check out his stuff. We've never
had a product that Bart sent us go bad, and his products are always of the
highest quality. Nuff said?
