Jetway 845EDAK: Less Is More
BIOS Version: F8 (24. May 2002)
The 845EDAK has six PCI slots, one CNR slot, two DIMM sockets, an AGP 4x slot with a card lock, an IDE controller from Promise (PDC20275, without RAID functionality) and an AC97 sound system based on a Realtek chip. Though surround-enabled (six channels), the sound system has very few external interfaces.
Jetway hasn't added any more features than were absolutely necessary. For example, the Promise chip doesn't support RAID mode. Nor does the board have a FireWire or network controller, which have to be added manually later.
The actual design of the Jetway board is well-engineered. Even though the floppy and secondary IDE connectors have been placed directly in front of three of the five PCI slots, the rest of the components have been arranged well. For instance, the AGP graphics card and the DIMM sockets don't get in each other's way, as is often the case.
The board comes with a driver CD, a ho-hum manual in English and a set of cables.
We have no gripes about the 845EDAK's performance and stability. On the contrary, the Jetway board makes it to the front of the pack in many benchmarks, directly competing with other, less reasonably-priced boards.
