The 694TX board features a built in 3D Audio Chip provided from the AC-97
codec and supports four USB ports thanks to the use of the latest VT82C686A
south-bridge. No external USB adapter is bundled in the kit. That is an extra
option..
The mainboard came packed with two IDE cables,
one standard ATA/33 (40pins) and an ATA/66 compatible 80pin cable. One FDD
cable was also present. The included user’s manual covers almost everything
a beginner would ever need, such as installing the CPU and RAM, and a full
look at the BIOS with the explanations for every option. Not to forget, a
complete chapter was focused on installing the drivers for the integrated
sound solution. Azza also included a second CD. It includes video clips on
troubleshooting, including some interactive clips on their newest products
and the audio drivers. The third CD is Azza’s Bonus pack.
We applaud Azza for their quality software bundle, which comes with every
single motherboard. First is a bonus pack featuring Virtual Drive, which is
a CD-ROM emulator. This program allows you to run applications without the
CD-ROM drive. You can copy & compress the CD programs to the hard-drive
and run them from that source instead or inserting your CD every time. The
second bonus is Virus Buster; which as you may guessed, is an Anti-Virus based
application.
The 694TX was a good performer, we did not experience any stability issues
whatsover. Even when we clocked our 550E to 133MHz Bus the board remained
stable. One problem that I took note of was that it was unable to clock the
SDRAM frequency bus to 133MHz when It was operating at 100MHz. I contacted
Azza about this bug. They took note of the problem and are currently working
on a BIOS update. Not a big problem, but sadly we will not be able to see
any 133MHz SDRAM results with a 100MHz CPU FSB.
Considerations
We already reviewed three different motherboards
from Azza. From our current experience with Azza products, we took notes on
some things we found important and think that they should be highly considered
by their engineers. First, I would like to point out the somehow minimal expansion
Azza uses on their boards. Most of their motherboards come with four PCI slots.
We must say that these days 4PCI slots is considered the very minimum, especially
for an i815 solution that can easily host up to six slots. We would highly
recommend they replace their motherboards featuring the AMR slots with an
optional PCI slot, or rework the PCB to add a fifth PCI slot without having
to eliminate the AMR slot.
Secondly, and maybe not the most important but
definitely worth mentioning, is their weak voltage regulations. I do realize
that not all motherboard makers support and encourage overclocking, but these
days the word overclocking has become something internal to the computer user.
We would highly encourage AZZA improve their voltage regulations. Maybe they
could include multiple voltage raises and make them all controllable via the
BIOS? These little features would be definitely appreciated by the end users.
