QDI Brilliant I
I received a few mails from people who seem to be very religious about QDI, claiming they'd make 'the best motherboards in the world'. Well, I would never dare saying this about any company, but I do admit that QDI is certainly a well organized Chinese motherboard manfacturer that procuces good products.
The Brilliant I however is pretty much an average board. It comes with only 3 DIMM sockets, uses the 'SpeedEasy' jumperless CPU setup, which has become very fashionable these days and it performs average too.
The features are also pretty much the same as what its competitors come with, including all the Wake Up features as well as Hardware monitoring.
The board ran fine and stable at up to 112 MHz with the three different memories I tested and it offers FSB clocks of either 66/68/75/83 or 100/103/112/133 depending on the FSB speed of the CPU. If you wish to overclock a FSB 66 MHz CPU to 100 MHz FSB or more, you'll require the 'B21 procedure' to do that.
Compatibility wise the Brilliant I was doing fine in the '5 card test', however it had a problem with the PnP ISA network card, which wouldn't connect to a network as soon as a SCSI card was plugged in as well and the IRQ was not 5.
The average performance, the compatibility problem, only three DIMM sockets and the difficulty in overclocking are the reasons why the Brilliant I could not make the recommendations list.
