Board Revision: W44 ?

BIOS Version: 1.30 (March 31, 2000)

Rioworks mainly dedicates on high-end workstation or server motherboards, so this board seems to be a mainstream product. It features the AMR slot, which is shared with one of the ISA slots, four PCI slots, AGP 4x, three DIMM sockets, UltraDMA/66, on board PC speaker, easy-to-open CPU locks, three fan headers, two USB ports and almost jumper free CPU configuration. There are two jumpers to set the FSB speed (66/100/133 MHz). Overclocking can be done in the BIOS, where you may chose lots of settings up to 150 MHz.

You can install up to 1.5 GByte SDRAM. ECC is not supported, but as the Rioworks board is not meant for high-end servers, its exclusion is not a problem. As an option, the board is available with a Creative sound chip to meet the AC97 specs. Common wake features like Wake On LAN, Ring or Modem are supported as well as standard monitoring functions.

Testing this board was not particularly exciting, since there was nothing exotic, which I could look forward to. Though using the fast 694X chipset, the board does not achieve better benchmark results than optimized 693A motherboards. Of course this would be no problem, but I was quite upset as the board failed the SYSmark in Windows NT over and over again, so that I cannot present you with a result.

I'd like to say that it's much more important to work on stability than on performance - if there were those numbers. The manual may be comprehensive and easy to understand, but at this time the PSVA is neither fast nor really stable.