Elitegroup L4S8A
Board Revision: 1.0
BIOS Version: November 5, 2002
With its L4S8X, Elitegroup moves even further away from the low-cost image that had haunted it up until a few years ago. The reason for this is the exemplary way in which the hardware is equipped, as well as its good performance. Although the board only offers five PCI slots, it has a significantly better layout than the boards from AOpen and DFI. Above all, the positioning of the IDE ports has led to the large dimensions of the board, although this makes cabling easier and keeps the area in front of the PCI slots free for long plug-in cards.
Directly in front of this is the connection for the disk drive, which many users do without. Only the serial ATA controller from Silicon Image, together with its two connectors, remains in the "plug-in area" of the receptacles. Thanks to the unobtrusive little cable, this is not a problem.
The board also offers a 100 Mbit network controller from Realtek, a FireWire codec from the same manufacturer (RTL-88018) and an AC97 sound codec from C-Media (CMI-9739A).
Like AOpen, Elitegroup provided the SiS963 with a cooling unit. It looks important, but it isn't.
This is the future: serial ATA allows up to 150 MB/ second. More important, however, is the easy connection of the cable (see left for the connector).
Cooling its insides. The cooling unit on the Southbridge (below right) is, however, completely unnecessary.
Once again, a Realtek: this time the RTL8100B is in the conventional PGA case.
The manual is comprehensive, which cannot be said of the included software package. At least antivirus software is included, in any case.
Simple, but impressive: the packaging.
