Intel's Strike Force: 19 DDR-Motherboards With 845 Chipset and DDR-Support

Biostar M7TDF

Board Revision: 1.1

BIOS Version: 1.29 (December 28, 2001)

This motherboard should be available with or without an IDE RAID controller from HighPoint (HPT372). We received the non-RAID version for this review.

The M7TDF differentiates itself from other boards with its 4 DIMM sockets and 6 PCI slots - that's the maximum for desktop systems. Thanks to the numerous DIMM sockets, you can install the absolute maximum of RAM supported by the i845 chipset, which is 4 GB. Due to the chipset's memory row limitation, this will only be possible using single-sided DIMMs.

Some companies seem to have difficulties sticking to the CPU specifications, as they exceed or fall below the regular clock speeds considerably. Biostar keeps strictly to the specs: the 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 ran at exactly the expected clock rate. And there are some basic overclocking options. The FSB speed can be raised up to 166 MHz. Unfortunately, there is no option to modify the CPU core voltage, thus limiting the overclocking range.

The test sample did not come with the full scope of materials, so we cannot comment on the manual or other items bundled with the package.

The M7TDF could be quite interesting for the OEM market, as it comes with rich features but without any additional stuff that could make the board more expensive than necessary.